You Could Be Alone
by squeakyswings
Summary: Everyone needs to escape, sometimes. — Lucy/Lorcan - For Ela
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: **I do not own Harry Potter.

**A/N:** This is for Ela (waltzingvelocity). You are positively lovely, a fantastic writer, and an amazing friend. I hope it doesn't disappoint!  
>I've put a link up on my profile to a Youtube playlist with all of the songs I've used throughout, if any of you are curious. <em><br>_

i. it's summer, say goodbye  
>(July, 2013)<p>

Molly and Lucy both knew that technically the first day of summer was the 21st of June. That was the solstice, the day Earth's upper hemisphere spun closest to the sun. They knew that; Molly had a solar chart in her room with Earth's orbit mapped on it, Lucy read about elliptical paths and planetary mass and gravitational pull until her dad brought home a book about wand cores and she got distracted.

But even though they knew better scientifically, both girls claimed that summer actually started earlier, in late May, when the air felt sticky and heavy with unshed rain and the stars looked hazy behind the curtain of Massachusetts humidity. It began just before their primary school released them to the wilds of empty days and their friends signed up for day camps and sleep-away camps and riding lessons. Summer came when Lucy and Molly's mother tucked them in beneath light cotton sheets and told them a story.

It was the same one every year, but Lucy and Molly never wanted her to change it. The words felt like hard candy as they gathered on Audrey's tongue; they were familiar and sweet and nostalgic. To the girls they promised a safe path from the past to the future.

Audrey always began, "Before you were born, there was a war. It happened in the United Kingdom, where your father is from, and it hurt a lot of people."

When she was very little, Molly hid her face in her pillow for this part. Lucy never did. She stared at her mother and watched the way her mouth formed the words; they fell flat from her lips—if her father had been telling the story, the words would have fallen up.

"Your father's family fought against Voldemort...the...the man who started it all." She always hesitated like that, over "the man". Lucy didn't realise until later that her mother was being generous, calling him a man. "Your uncle George's twin brother, Fred, died in the war. Your uncle Harry defeated Voldemort."

At three and four and five, Molly had asked questions. She had wondered why her daddy hadn't been the one to win it all. She had begged Audrey for details, for descriptions of the bad guys and the good guys; she had wanted to know what spells they had used and how long everything had lasted. Lucy had stayed silent. She hadn't wanted details. She hated remembering that people could hurt.

"I wasn't there," Audrey eventually continued. "I was still at school, here in the States. We heard about the War, but it never came to America. I wanted to help, though, so after I graduated from school I went to England and volunteered with their Ministry of Magic to assist the families that had been affected.

"I met your father at a function for the survivors of the War. He was standing by the punch bowl and he looked hopelessly awkward, so I went up to him and said hello. I don't think he'd have said anything to me if your aunt Ginny hadn't come over and forced him to talk." Their mother always smiled at the memory but it made Molly angry and Lucy sad—their father was among their top five favourite people in the world and they didn't like that he had been a coward once. Molly thought that as a Gryffindor he ought to have been braver, and Lucy felt like a traitor but she always wished that he hadn't given her his genes.

"He worked for the Ministry, just like he does now, but back then he was working to help reorganise the government after the War. If he had stayed in that department, he wouldn't have been able to come with me when I had to help with your grandma and grandpa, just after you were born, Lucy. But he transferred and followed us here and we haven't left."

That was a lie though: Molly and Lucy knew that their dad left almost every day, even on weekends. He still worked too much. It was lucky that he had managed to get an International Apparation licence, or else he'd probably have had to quit his job. Or he'd have quit their family. Molly didn't think he was that big of a coward. Lucy thought he might have been.

"We both agreed that we wanted you to grow up with your cousins and go to your father's old school. But we couldn't bear the thought of sending you away during the school year when you're so young, and I couldn't afford to homeschool you. Because it's summer," and maybe this part of the story was what confused their conception of the seasons, "you'll Floo to your grandma and grandpa's in England as soon as school lets out. Dad'll stop by to see you once a week and I will see you in September." And then she dropped a kiss on Molly's fiery curls and Lucy's short blonde mess and told them, "I'll miss you."

But the summer that Molly was eleven and Lucy was nine, Audrey didn't end the story that way. Instead, she said, "This year, Moll, you'll be going to Hogwarts at the end of the summer. I'll come up at the end of August to see you off, and then you'll be home again for Christmas. It'll be here before you know it."

Molly had stopped showing her fear, but her teeth bit into her lower lip and Lucy knew that she didn't think she was ready for Hogwarts. Lucy thought Molly was, though. She had to go to Hogwarts soon, or else all of her friends from school would realise there was something different about them. Molly's magic had slid from her control too many times.

Sometimes Lucy wished that the magic gene had skipped her; she wouldn't have minded being a Muggle. Her friends were nice, she could stay with them. They used multi-coloured crayons to fill in zebras in colouring books and Maddie actually believed that there was a man in the moon.

But Lucy knew that she wasn't a Muggle. She could make the bubbles in her bath impermeable and sometimes she shrunk her dad's socks so he'd take longer to leave in the morning. She couldn't do anything else, not yet, but she knew that she would be following Molly to that strange place from her aunts' and uncles' stories. She'd see why Vic and Dom and Louis always whispered together at dinner, and she'd get a striped tie and pretend like she had grown up in the United Kingdom, rather than America. She'd pretend like the story her mother told them every summer was a part of her own past, rather than a barely recognisable and distant piece of history.

Because she was magic, Lucy wished she was two years older; she wished that she could go to Hogwarts with Molly. She was nervous about being alone.

:::

_Well, this is a pleasant surprise_.  
>"What is?"<br>_Another Weasley.  
><em>"There're a lot of us."  
><em>Well, at least you are easy to place.<br>_"Aren't we all?"  
><em>No. But you're a <em>GRYFFINDOR.

ii. bored with insanity  
>(July, 2014)<p>

Lorcan and Lysander's parents told them that nargles had led them to each other. The twins thought that this was possibly true, but only because their parents both believed in nargles. Luna and Rolf might have followed those invisible (unreal) creatures toward the legendary hollow in the cliff face where they ran head-on into each other because their eyes were busy searching for figments of their imaginations. Luna told the boys that at first she didn't think she loved their father; she thought that something had infested her brain and made her think that she liked him when in actual fact she thought that Rolf Scamander was a bit of a stuck-up lunatic.

"Eventually though," she always sighed, smoothing Lysander's hair and wiping chocolate from Lorcan's chin, "he managed to convince me that I was not infected and that I did actually love him."

"Do you still?" Lysander always asked, even though their dad sat right _there_ at the table in their oversized tent and so obviously she would tell them that she did.

But she never just said it. She always left off cleaning up the supper dishes and skipped to her husband's side, leaning her pale blonde head against his dark one and pressing a kiss to his unshaven cheek before she smiled at her sons. "Of course I do."

Lysander always smiled back and Lorcan always scowled. He wished his parents were a little unhappy, or that his twin was a little more discerning. It was difficult, being the only realist in a family of dreamers. But at least Lysander didn't believe in nargles. If his brother had been _that_ much of an idiot Lorcan would have been forced to go live with his godfather and Merlin knew that Neville had more than enough children running over his house.

Sometimes Lorcan wished he could have moved in with Neville anyway. His family never stopped travelling, searching for some new species or some ancient (read: unreal) creature, and Lorcan had left pieces of himself—clothing, Quidditch figurines, books—across six continents. Only one thing had accompanied Lorcan to each new campsite: the small notebook his aunt Ginny (faux-aunt but those are the best kinds) had given him for his fifth birthday. He had begun a count-down on its pages at age five and a half, and he was just about to scratch the last tally-mark into the paper.

He left his and Lysander's tent one morning in July to find his parents standing over a violet campfire. His mother stared at an empty skillet and his father had his back to the campsite. He turned just as Lorcan was picking up his shoes to check for scorpions or other venomous (and existent) nasties. Rolf held two thick envelopes in his right hand, and he smiled at his son, but the smile was strained.

"This arrived for you by owl this morning." Rolf held out one of the envelopes and Lorcan dropped his shoes.

He ignored the sad look his parents exchanged as he took the letter from his father. He read the address with the sort of reverence he usually reserved for steak pies and real beds, running one dirty finger over the label:

_Lorcan Scamander  
>Second Cot, Smallest Tent, Sonoran Desert<br>Arizona, United States of America  
><em>

He was going to Hogwarts.

:::

_You are eager, aren't you?  
><em>"Just tell me where I belong."  
><em>Could be in Slytherin, with that attitude.<br>_"With the snakes? Thank you, no."  
><em>Definitely not a Ravenclaw.<br>_"And not a Hufflepuff, either."  
><em>If you think so. That makes it <em>GRYFFINDOR.

iii. somebody should stop time  
>(July, 2015)<p>

Lucy clambered over the stone wall that lined the Burrow's back property and landed shakily on the hill that fell immediately behind it. She took a few hurried steps down the slope before veering left, ducking beneath the leafy branches of a tree leaning out of the hillside, and scrambling up the trunk until she sat comfortably on a broad branch, her freckled legs dangling on either side of the limb. She reached into the bag that hung over her shoulder and pulled out the thick book she kept there; it fell open to a page a little past the middle, where she had placed a folded slip of parchment to keep her place.

She'd started _Little Women_ just before coming over to her grandparents', and her mother had tried to convince her to leave it home. "You won't have time for reading over there, Luce. You'll be too busy with your cousins and practising Quidditch and getting ready for school to even think about books!"

Lucy had considered throwing a full-blown tantrum, but instead she had repacked her trunk and slipped the book beneath her jumpers and jeans at the very bottom. Her mum believed her when she said her trunk was extra heavy because she needed winter clothes this year.

James, Albus, and Lily had come over the first night Lucy'd been at the Burrow, and she had slipped away from them after dinner, finding her tree just as she had left it the year before. The torch she always kept in her trunk barely functioned with the magic buzzing around her, but it was working just well enough for her to read late into the night, and she got back to the house as the Potters were being bundled off into the fire by their parents.

"Where'd you run off to?" James asked, as Harry tried unsuccessfully to hand him some Floo Powder.

"Nowhere," Lucy replied. "I was just wandering."

James shrugged and then glanced up at his father, an exasperated expression on his face. "Honestly, Dad, I'm going." He turned to grin at Lucy. "Two months and we'll be at Hogwarts, hey, Lu?"

She sighed. "Yeah. We will be."

"It'll be brill, won't it?"

She sounded even less enthusiastic. "Yeah. It will."

"Okay, okay, Dad." James finally took the green powder from his father and disappeared in the fire.

"See you next week, Lucy?" Harry grinned at her and she nodded, forcing a smile back. Then the room was empty, aside from Lucy and Molly.

"Where were you really?" Molly had asked.

Lucy glanced at her older sister and thought about the story their mother used to tell them at the beginning of summer. Audrey hadn't told it in the two years since Molly started at Hogwarts; she thought that Lucy must have had it memorised. Lucy hadn't protested, but sometimes she missed lying beside her sister in their beds, hearing the familiar words in the empty air of their room. Sometimes she just missed Molly. Not this girl, not the one who cursed like the boys and cast spells even though she wasn't supposed to and had eaten seven earthworms and then kissed Fred on a dare. She missed the sister who doubted herself.

"Nowhere," Lucy had told her sister, that first night at the Burrow. "I'm going to bed."

She had felt Molly's grey eyes on her back as she slipped up the stairs to her bedroom, the one at the very top of the house that had once belonged to their uncle Ron.

And here she was, a month later, rereading _Little Women_ for the third time because she couldn't get any other Muggle novels. She twisted the ring on her index finger with her thumb and looked at it. Her friend Seth had given it to her for her eleventh birthday. It was a mood ring, he'd said, because his mum had suggested it, saying it was "retro" and therefore "cool", and also because he never could tell what Lucy was feeling. It was supposed to change colours, but on Lucy's finger it was always black. It still was. She didn't stop wearing it though. She hoped someday it might turn red one day, for excited, or orange, for daring.

She looked away from the disappointing ring and through the branches and leaves around her at the darkening sky. There was a shape moving in the expanse of inky blue: an owl, winging its way toward the Burrow. She felt sick.

It was the end of July. Hogwarts letters arrived at the end of July.

The last remnants of her childhood blew off, disappearing in the wake of an owl's flight.

:::

_Well, this is interesting._  
>"Can we please just get this over with? Stick me in Hufflepuff, if you want to."<br>_But you say that you want to go home.  
><em>"That's not really an option, is it? Just put me somewhere, please."  
><em>But you're not homesick. You just don't want to be here.<br>_"Put me _somewhere_. Please."  
><em>Not Slytherin, not Gryffindor, couldn't be Hufflepuff. You'll be okay in <em>RAVENCLAW.

iv. we're not meant to have self-control  
>(May, 2020)<p>

Lorcan was rather fond of parties. He was especially fond of Gryffindor parties—he was of the entirely unbiased opinion that Gryffindor House threw the best ones in the school, perhaps even the entire country. He had had five years of experience at Hogwarts, and technically sixteen years of experience total (although most of his life experience had nothing to do with partying) so he considered himself an expert in the matter.

He knew only one other expert, and she was leaving Hogwarts soon for the real world. Whatever the fuck that meant. Lorcan thought that she would probably just marry rich and continue leaving a wreckage of hearts behind her. But Dominique Weasley would never admit to such a devious scheme.

She was swaying on a table by the fire, her arms flung out like skeletal wings, her eyes closed and her cheeks glowing. She was older and she was dangerous and she was a Weasley, but she was also fun and gorgeously blonde and Merlin, so fucking deadly. If Lorcan had taken the time to make a bucket list, snogging Dominique Weasley would have been the first thing on it.

She might have been drunk enough that night. More importantly, she might have been desperate enough—rumour had it she had caught her usual fuck buddy William Smith on the Quidditch pitch with Georgiana Nott, and they had not been riding broomsticks. So there was a chance—a slim one—that she would let him touch her.

He crossed the room, winding his way through the sweaty bodies of his housemates, until he reached the Dominique's stage. He stood below her and looked up, and from this angle her jean-clad legs looked like they went on the way the Eiffel Tower went on, all in a hellish haze of lust.

"Scamander!" She smiled at him and his heart pounded. "Get up here!"

He placed suddenly sweaty palms against the table and pushed down, his forearms straining to bear his weight. She laughed and grabbed at his wrist, pulled him close, closer, and pressed her hips against his. "Scamander," she hummed and he could have sworn that the last sixteen years had hurtled purposefully toward this one moment.

"Come away with me," he whispered against the diamond in her earlobe.

"Okay." She took his hand and jumped from the table, somehow landing steadily among the dancing crowd beneath them. He followed more slowly and she tugged him forward, toward the portrait hole.

"Dom? Where're we going?"

"Away, like you said."

She stopped just outside the entranceway and pressed him against the wall, her lips sloppily searching against his. It took his drink-addled brain a moment to catch up, and then he was kissing her back; the stones were rough against his shoulder blades, Dominique was soft against his front.

The voices came down the corridor suddenly, bouncing around the walls like horrible, vivid, razor-winged moths.

"Dominique!" That was Potter. James. Why the fuck was James Potter not in his bed in the fourth year dormitories, like all under-fifth year Gryffindors were supposed to be? Why the fuck was he screaming his cousin's name when his cousin was clearly indisposed?

Dominique groaned into Lorcan's mouth and pulled away, brushing strands of sweat-sticky hair from her eyes. She turned to face the shouting imbecile and Lorcan slowly turned his head, too, so he could fully appreciate the disintegration of his perfect night.

It wasn't just James Potter. Albus was there, too, the third year Slytherin staring at Lorcan and Dominique with eyes that were far too wide; his hand was halfway to covering Lily's eyes, like he had been trying to shield her from the display. Hugo had his eyes squeezed shut, a blush reddening his face. And Roxanne and Rose were there, even though they should have _definitely_ been tucked into the third year Gryffindor dormitories hours ago, and Molly and Fred, whom he thought he'd seen at the party only a little bit ago. The only one missing was Louis, and Lorcan was ninety-nine percent sure he'd seen Dom's brother ghost off with Viv earlier.

And Lucy.

"Where's Luce?" Dom asked, making a valiant effort not to slur her cousin's name.

"That's what we're wondering," Rose's eyes hadn't even jerked towards Lorcan, and he's impressed at how calm she seemed. She'd always struck him as the prude in the Wealsey/Potter clan.

"You haven't seen her?" Molly asked.

"No," Dom shook her head and reached out to steady herself against the wall, but her hand landed and fastened on Lorcan's shoulder instead. She didn't move it.

"Shit," Molly's voice sounded hard.

"Why? Isn't she in Ravenclaw?"

"No," Hugo said. "I just went to find her because I wanted help with something for Charms and she wasn't there. No one had seen her for a while and," he lowered his voice, like Lorcan couldn't hear everything he said if he stopped shouting, "James can't find her on...you know."

Lily was glaring at him accusingly, like he should have defected to the common room as soon as the Great and Terrible Ginger Army interrupted his very promising snog-fest with Dom.

He probably should have. Dom had let go of him and was stepping unsteadily toward her cousins.

"Fuck," she said. "Fuck, let's go find her."

Lorcan wanted to point out that Dom wasn't really going to be much help finding anyone, and that her cousins should probably just leave her to him and go find Lucy on their own, but then Dom whirled and ordered, "Scamander, get your useless arse inside and find Louis."

"But.." Find Louis? Was she joking? Louis was with Vivian Parkinson, the Ravenclaw who should have been a Slytherin, whose curses had once forced Lysander to spend an entire week in the hospital wing, getting a very vital part of his body back in working order. "He's with Viv," Lorcan attempted desperately.

"He could be with fucking Voldemort and you would still be going to get him." Dominique suddenly sounded a lot more sober, and much angrier. Lorcan nodded and mumbled the password to a scandalized-looking Fat Lady. He found Louis in a corner on the opposite side of the common room, snogging Vivian so fiercely that Lorcan was afraid that when he separated them the anti-suck-factor would cause an imbalance in the pressures of the room and send Gryffindor Tower exploding off into space.

"Louis," he tugged at the older boy's T-shirt. Nothing. "Louis," he nearly shouted.

"Fuck off, Scamander," Vivian turned to glare at him, her eyes terrifying.

"Louis, Dom wants you."

"Your sister can wait, Weasley," Vivian informed her conquest. To his credit, Louis dodged her swooping lips so they fastened on his neck and he was free to look up at Lorcan. Despite his nonchalance about public snogging when it came to himself and Dom, Lorcan was starting to feel uncomfortable.

"Why?" Louis asked suspiciously.

"Something about Lucy."

Louis abruptly pulled away from Viv, taking her by the waist and pushing her up so she had to either stand or land on her arse. She chose the former, placing her hands on her hips and glaring from Lorcan to Louis and back again. "What the—" she began, but Louis interrupted her.

"She's missing again? Fuck." And then he pushed past Lorcan and was out of the portrait hole in under a minute. Lorcan turned to look at Vivian. Her long-lashed eyes were daggers.

"Look," Lorcan held up his hands, "I was just about to shag Dominique when the Freckled Brigade barged in. Don't get pissed at me."

Vivian looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. "They're insane." She sounded fond. Lorcan felt differently.

"That is the truth."

"See you, Scamander," and Viv wound her way through the crowd to the portrait hole, disappearing back to Ravenclaw.

Lorcan punched the wall. Fucking Lucy Weasley was such a bloody cock-blocker.

v. lost and leaving  
>(May, 2020)<p>

She had always gotten lost; it was her quirk, the way Molly always chose "dare" in truth or dare and Lily kept secrets and Louis fell in love every second. It was not dangerous or disturbed or anything, she had done it at home in Massachusetts, disappearing into the woods for hours—once she even spent a night outdoors and came home the next morning to find her parents patiently waiting for her by the front door—and at her grandparents' and at the Potter's, when she stayed there for Christmas holidays. But during first year she seriously screwed up, and made it so that "Lucy's lost" was synonymous with "Panic!" in her family.

That first time, she hadn't been at Hogwarts long enough to understand the way the Castle changed its layout at will, to experience the wild swing of a staircase or the twist of an unknown corner in a corridor. But she had been at Hogwarts long enough to understand that she had a serious defect. It had started with the Sorting Hat (well, it had started before the Sorting Hat, of course, but he/it had cemented it in her consciousness). Lucy Weasley did not belong.

This was not an emotion driven by teenage angst (she had only been eleven). It wasn't born from lack of effort—she chatted with her housemates (until they all went off on long, boring tangents about something or other they'd read in this horribly dry tome), ate meals with her cousins, went to Quidditch matches wearing blue and bronze scarves and mittens and even a headband her aunt Fleur had sent her. But she wasn't happy. And so third week of her first year she disappeared.

Lucy had just meant to wander off, to find somewhere to sit alone with _The Magician's Nephew, _whichshe had snagged off the shelves in her aunt Hermione's house the night before leaving for Hogwarts. She hadn't really intended to become so lost that she couldn't find her way out of Hogwarts's stone corridors. She hadn't intended to break down into sobs in front of a painting of an old Duke. The painting had no idea how to handle the heaving mess of blonde hair who had just collapsed across the hall from him.

"Eh," he began. It didn't seem a particularly promising start, but at least he had said something. "Eh," he repeated, louder, when she didn't respond. "Excuse me?"

"What?" Her voice echoed high in the corridor. He hadn't seen any students in at least three months, and he cursed whatever god it was that had sent _this_ banshee child.

"Do you need something?" His voice was stiff.

"Oh, no, I'm perfectly fine, thank you." She didn't sound perfectly fine, and while he had never been trained in the intricacies of human voices, he _thought_ she sounded rather like Violet did when he asked her whether she thought Sir Cadogan had gotten saner. He thought that tone was known as sarcasm.

"Are you sure? Because I could send for someone. What's your name?"

"Lucy Weasley," she told him. "And I'm fine, really."

"Okay." The Duke watched her cry for a few more minutes and then he could feel the lines in his paint cracking from all the emotion in the air. He hurried out of his frame and into one a few corridors over, where he begged the witches there to: "Find Lucy Weasley's friends and tell them she's in the West Corridor over the Dungeons crying."

And that's where it all began. Molly and Fred and James and Dom and Louis came running through the castle, pushing other students out of the way in their need to find Lucy, and when they found her, tear-streaked and red-faced, they each vowed to never let her go missing again.

Lucy had not been happy. She blacklisted the Duke and made occasional escapes to distant corners of the castle, but her sister or one of her cousins always found her just after an hour. She spent her first four years at Hogwarts feeling hounded by numerous red-headed Weasleys, and the night that her family interrupted Lorcan and Dominique she had finally found her way to the passage to Hogsmeade. She curled in a corner booth of the Three Broomsticks with a worn copy of _A Tale of Two Cities_ and she was sipping a Butterbeer and falling in love with Sydney Carton and feeling an unusual web of peace around her when an army of dusty, sweaty teenagers burst through the door.

She looked up and muttered, "Fuck," but was smiling by the time Molly collapsed beside her and rested her head on her shoulder.

"You need to stop doing this," Molly told her. "I can't keep worrying about you whenever I'm not with you."

"I'm fine," Lucy said, tapping a finger against the cover of the book. "Just reading."

"Can't you do that in Ravenclaw Tower?" James asked. "Or the library, so we don't need to freak out when you're not on the map?"

"What do you think is going to happen to me?" Lucy sighed. "When you can't find me, what do you think is going on?"

Her family exchanged a line of glances, Al to Lily to Molly to James to Roxy to Hugo to Dom to Fred to Louis, and back down, and finally Al confessed, his voice small, "We're afraid you'll leave us."

Lucy raised her eyebrows and closed her book, slipping it into her bag. "What, like run away? Where would I go?"

Dom grabbed at Louis's wrist when he said, "More like, disappear."

Lucy's eyes widened. "I would never, ever, leave for good."

"You promise?" Louis asked. Lucy nodded, and suddenly all of them were holding out spit-spattered hands.

"Shake on it," Molly ordered. "You won't ever disappear on us. Not for real."

Lucy spat in her hand, but she didn't reach for Al's yet. "Only if you promise me something," she said.

Dom sighed. "What?"

"Sometimes I need to be alone. Let me be."

There was the chain of glances again, but Louis finally nodded. "Okay." He thrust his hand toward Lucy and she shook it tightly, moving from cousin to cousin to sister to cousin until the promises had been made.

"I'll go back in a little while," she told them. "I just want to finish this section, all right?"

"I'll stay," Albus volunteered, and Lucy shook her head.

"No, Al. I will come back on my own. It's fine."

"Okay, okay," and they left her the way they came, a mass of red hair and freckled skin and overlapping limbs, out the door.

vi. it's just a little bit mysterious  
>(September, 2021)<p>

Lorcan Scamander had never spent much time in the library. It wasn't that he had anything against it, necessarily, just that he had never seen much point in going to it. He did well enough in his classes without all that revising nonsense. Or he had, until Lysander had turned into a bastard and refused to help him with his NEWT courses. And so on the fifth day of his seventh year, when by all rights he ought to have been preparing for the end-of-first-week party in Gryffindor common room, he was sitting at a table in the far corner of the library, surrounded by stacks and stacks of textbooks, about ready to kill himself.

Okay, so that may have been a bit dramatic. But, here he was, one of five people buried this deep in the stacks, and he was not happy about having to spend quality time with textbooks.

Quality time. He snorted at the thought. He wasn't actually spending much time at all reading. He had collected them from the shelves and then, deciding that he deserved a break, he had drafted out his plans for the following weekend's post-Quidditch-match party. Then he had opened one book, read a sentence, written the sentence down (because if he had learned one thing from spending time with Lysander, it was that every good student took notes), and then dropped his forehead to the book, hoping for some magical transference of knowledge from the pages to his brain. After five minutes he decided that wasn't working and lifted his head.

He read the one line copied out on his paper: "The study of Transfiguration is one of the most difficult in the whole of the magical world."

"No, shit," he complained to his parchment.

"What?"

He glanced over his shoulder and saw a vaguely familiar freckled girl sitting two tables over from him. She only had one book in front of her, a thick text lying open, and she was looking at him through hazy blue eyes. The sight of her brought the taste of Firewhiskey forcefully to his tongue and he finally placed her: Lucy Weasley; blonde; Ravenclaw; sixth year (he was ninety percent sure); and award-winning cock-blocker (one-hundred-seventy percent positive).

"Sorry?" he said. Just because the girl had destroyed what would undoubtedly have been the best night of his life a year and a half before didn't mean that he needed to be rude to her.

"You just said, 'No, shit'," Lucy pointed out. "You weren't talking to me?"

It also didn't mean that he needed to be terribly polite. "No, shit, Weasley."

She shrugged her jagged shoulders up under her ears and returned to her book. He stared at her. She fiddled with her hair while she read, winding a blonde curl around her index finger, until it rubbed against a ring—it looked like a black circle surrounded by tarnished metal. "What's that?" he asked.

"What?" she asked.

"That ring," he said. "What is it?"

She held her hand to her chest for a moment, pale against the red of her jumper, and then extended it towards him so he could see that it was exactly what it looked like. A black ring surrounded by tarnished silver. "Does it mean something?"

"It's a Muggle thing. It's supposed to change colours, but it's never worked." She glanced around them; they were talking across the space of two empty tables and the other few people around them were shooting them affronted glares. "Any other questions?"

"Nope." Although he really did want to know why she was wearing a Muggle ring. And also, why that ring was supposed to change colours and why she had never Charmed it to fix it. But from the expression on her face, he didn't think she'd be too amenable to any more questions. So he turned back to his Transfiguration textbook and tried to focus.

Luckily, a few minutes later, another distraction arrived. This one came in the form of a Slytherin sixth year, Samson Parkinson, who was a year advanced at Potions and had once told Lorcan to "Fuck off" during a lesson and hadn't even gotten reprimanded for it.

Samson didn't glance at Lorcan, though. He strode past his table and collapsed at Lucy's. Lorcan stopped breathing so he could hear.

"Weasley," Samson said. Lorcan tensed. What if the bloke was upset at Lucy for something; what if he attacked her in the middle of the library?

"Parkinson," Lucy responded. She didn't sound nervous. Lorcan wished he could crane his neck around to look at her, but he didn't want to be too obvious.

"You know everyone's looking for you again? James just came running down to the dungeon to grab Al and Lily, even though Al's supposed to be training for Quidditch and Lily was helping Eliot out with some stupid prank they've got planned."

"So?" Lucy sounded annoyed now, although Lorcan didn't really see what was annoying about her family looking for her. It just meant she was loved.

"So, all of Slytherin House is currently pretty pissed at you. I'm not telling you this as a threat or anything. I'm just saying, if you could go tell your cousins that you were in the library and that they need to stop freaking out every time they can't find you, that'd be great."

"I've told them," Lucy muttered. "They don't listen, Sam." Lorcan heard movement and he imagined Lucy standing.

"Or, actually," Samson responded softly, "looks like Potter's found you."

"Shit," Lucy fell back into her chair. Lorcan stared as a furious James wound his way between the shelves, his hands in his pockets and his hazel eyes pissed. Samson hurried past Lorcan's table, nodding to James as he made for the exit. Potter didn't respond.

He stopped in front of Lucy's table and this time Lorcan gave into his need to turn around; after all, everyone else in the library was staring at the two cousins, Lucy sitting and looking up at James, her eyes calm although Lorcan noticed that she was playing with the ring on her index finger. From the set of James's shoulders, Lorcan thought he was probably ready to spit fire.

"You promised, Lucy." He sounded weary.

"What?"

"That you'd come to Hogsmeade with me and Rose and Roxy to get Lily's birthday gift. Where've you been?"

"Oh, shit. James, I forgot, I swear I didn't mean to." Lorcan had never seen any of the Weasleys unarmed the way Lucy seemed just then, and he narrowed his eyes, trying to figure her out. She was too erratic for him.

"Sure, Luce. Just like you 'forgot' that you were meant to be helping Roxy with Charms last week and that you were going to take Hugo to Hogsmeade last weekend and that your parents' anniversary was last Saturday. You know what?" He squared his shoulders and Lorcan could feel an electric charge in the air. "You've got a serious problem, Lucy. You act like you don't belong here, like you're waiting for something better, like we all mean nothing to you. And maybe you don't and maybe we don't mean a thing but Merlin, you're still family. Are you just too selfish to see what that means?"

That, Lorcan thought, seemed a bit harsh. He couldn't see Lucy's face; James hid her from his line of sight, but her intake of breath was enough to tell Lorcan that her cousin's words had hurt her.

"Stop looking at me like that." James turned and began to move toward the exit, and then faced her and spat, "Your parents really fucked up when they sent you to Muggle school. You never really left, did you? Still reading Muggle books and dreaming of a Muggle life, aren't you?"

He didn't expect an answer. And that was good, because Lucy was in no state to provide one. She had her head down, her fingers dug into her scalp beneath all that blonde. She looked hurt and broken.

Lorcan sent a tripping hex after James, but the bastard barely stumbled. It wasn't that Lorcan cared anything for Lucy Weasley, it was just...no one should ever have been able to make anyone feel as small as James had made her feel.

After a few minutes of stunned silence in the library, broken only by Lucy's sharp breaths, Lorcan stood, leaving his books and note(s) behind him. He needed to find Rose or Hugo. They'd be able to help him.

vii. seventeen possibilities, one reality  
>(October, 2021)<p>

Lucy had given James a week. Not because she felt he deserved one, but because she was too afraid of facing him. He had been a bastard—nearly the entire school agreed with her there, including the entire population of Slytherin and Ravenclaw—but he had also been honest. Lucy was scared of other truths he might release, more scalding honesty.

So she gave him a week, and then she approached him in the Great Hall at breakfast, partially so there would be witnesses if he decided to curse her, and partially so that the whole school would know how their fight (hopefully) ended, and therefore would (hopefully) stop gossiping about her.

She sat down at the Gryffindor table across from him. He looked at her until she finally said, "You were right."

"I was mean."

"Well, yeah. You were. But you were also right. I am selfish and I haven't been there for you or for anyone else, really. I'm sorry. I will try to do better."

James nodded. "Okay."

"Okay."

Lucy stood and turned to leave the Great Hall, but from somewhere down the Gryffindor table someone shouted, "Merlin, Potter. Apologise!"

"I was getting there, Scamander," James shot back. Lucy hesitated and looked over her shoulder at her cousin. "I'm sorry for what I said, Lu."

Lucy shrugged. "It's over." She hadn't forgotten, it was unlikely she'd really forgive, but she could say she'd let it go. She left the Great Hall before meddlesome Lorcan Scamander could interfere again, or before one of her other cousins decided to jump into the discussion. As far as she was concerned, it was finished.

Although she'd told James that she would change, she didn't do much differently over the next few weeks. She still spent most of her time alone, with books, but she did find herself in the library more often than not. She also made sure to bother one or two of her cousins for at least an hour every night.

One morning in early October, Lucy came into the library to find her usual table occupied; Lorcan Scamander was bent over a Defence textbook. Lucy shook her head as she passed him; considering the amount of time Lorcan had spent in the library since the start of school, she would have expected him to have top marks in his classes, but Sam had told her that he was mostly hopeless at Potions still. She wasn't sure what he did with the stacks of textbooks that surrounded him daily, but she was fairly certain he wasn't reading them.

She went to the one bookshelf in the whole library that held Muggle novels and tugged _Her Fearful Symmetry_ from its place. She found a seat at a different table, shot one last glare at Lorcan for good measure, and opened the book.

It fell to a page near the middle, where someone had shoved a slip of paper deep against the spine. She tugged at the paper and smoothed it on the table, surprised to see that there was writing there. The handwriting was unfamiliar, slim and slanted, undoubtedly a boy's. She narrowed her eyes to read the one line: _I'm not the man you think I am_.

The wording was familiar. As she mouthed the words, she felt the beginnings of a rhythm beneath the movement of her lips, like she ought to be singing them. She leaned out of her chair and rummaged in her bag, searching for the iPod she had spent all of second year Charming to work in the magical world. Her hand finally slid against its plastic case. She pulled it out and untangled the earphones, spinning the dial so the songs whirled past on the screen.

Of course. The Smiths. Sticking her earphones in her ears she pressed on "Pretty Girls Make Graves" and read the slip of paper as the lyrics burst into her ears. _I'm not the man you think I am_.

Who else at Hogwarts would have been familiar with The Smiths? A Muggle-born, clearly. But then, who other than a Muggle-born would have been reading _Her Fearful Symmetry_?

Lucy flipped in the book and was surprised to see that another slip of paper was taped to the centre of the page. It had the same handwriting on it, and she read: _L—I'm not the man you think I am._

Another page. Another piece of paper. _Lucy—I'm not the man you think I am._

Again. _Lucy—I'm not the man you think I am. –Lorcan_

Lucy glanced over at Scamander to see him staring into his book in apparent concentration; the first time she'd actually seen him concentrate in the library. She scowled. "Hey," she hissed across the emptiness between them.

He glanced up and attempted an innocent blink, but she had spent summers with Lily and Louis—she didn't fall for false innocence.

"What the hell is this?" She shook _Her Fearful Symmetry_ so sharply that paper fell like confetti from between the pages, scattering the table with one line from a Muggle song, repeated over and over and _over_.

"What, Weasley?" Lorcan stood, swinging his bag over his shoulder, and approached her table. He leaned over the slips of paper, like he needed to see them, and then he lifted his gaze to hers and she saw blue and seriousness and he said, "I am not the man you think I am."

And then he left.

Lucy stared after him. As far as mysterious went, Lorcan had it down. Or maybe it was batshit crazy.

She looked at the paper and then at the book. The real question was, how had he known that she was going to read _this _book next? It wasn't as if her progression through the novels Hogwarts kept followed any pattern. She got up and moved toward the shelves, pulled _War and Peace_ off, because if he had truly wanted to ensure that _she_ saw the note, he'd have to have put them in every single Muggle novel.

_War and Peace_ opened to somewhere near the end. Lucy read: _Lucy Weasley—I'm not the man you think I am. –Lorcan Scamander_

Batshit crazy. Definitely.

She replaced _War and Peace_ and banished all but one of the quotes with a wave of her wand. She slipped the remaining one into her pocket and reached for _Her Fearful Symmetry._ She took it back to Ravenclaw Tower and climbed into her four-poster, tugging shut the curtains and trying to focus long enough to read. But her mind kept wandering back to the note. Or more accurately, to the why of the note.

Maybe Scamander wanted her to know him. It wouldn't have been that strange, she supposed. Everyone wants to be known, really known, by someone, at some point in their lives.

She tugged a notebook from beneath her pillow and a quill from beneath her duvet and brushed the sharpened point over her cheek as she considered Scamander's writing. _I'm not the man you think I am._

Who did she even think he was, though? He had made a pretty fierce assumption, in guessing that she even thought about him at all, let alone that she had formed some sort of vague and incorrect impression of his person in her mind.

But she must have. Because the thought of Lorcan Scamander made her tongue feel heavy, made an unpleasant feeling squirm in her gut and a bitterness swarm her taste-buds. So, Lorcan Scamander.

She scratched out his name at the top of a blank page in her notebook and then wrote: _Lorcan Scamander is:_

_ -A Gryffindor  
><em>_-A man-whore  
><em>_-Revising (or attempting to) for the first time in his life  
><em>_-A partier  
><em>_-A twin  
><em>_-An eavesdropper_

She really didn't think about him that much, or she didn't think that much about him, whichever. She thought he was attractive, of course, but the messiness of his blond hair and the blueness of his eyes and the angle of his chin and the fit of his jeans didn't really factor into what she thought of him. They were just facts.

Lucy tore the page out of her notebook and considered for a moment how to get it to Lorcan. It would have been easy enough to get into Gryffindor and hand it to him herself, or to give it to Rose to give to him, but both of those options seemed unoriginal, and Lorcan had been creative in getting his note(s) to her.

The next morning at breakfast, she slipped behind Lorcan at the Gryffindor table and very carefully Charmed the list into the pocket of his loose-hanging robes. He glanced back at her when she brushed past him to whisper something into Rose's ear, but he didn't seem aware that she'd responded to his note.

They didn't interact for several days, and then Lucy opened _Her Fearful Symmetry_ in her bed one night and another paper fell out. This time: _Does it mean that you don't love me anymore?_

She blinked. Merlin, the boy was insufferable. When had she _ever_ implied that she loved him? When had she ever implied that she loved _anyone_, for that matter? The words were lyrics, of course they were. The Beatles, she thought.

She could have ignored him. She knew that was an option, and a good one. But for some reason she really wanted to respond to him. She felt like something was happening, something in a life that had been an exhausting repetition of being lost and getting found. And so she pulled her iPod out and scrolled through the songs until she settled upon a response. _If I needed someone to love / You're the one that I'd be thinking of._

Lies were okay, she thought. In this realm of notes and secrets and silences, lies were probably better than truths. And so she folded the paper into a paper crane and sent Lorcan a lie from The Beatles.

viii. find a way, go away  
>(November, 2021)<p>

Lorcan thought about Lucy's response for a while. He wasn't sure whether she was making fun of him, or whether she meant it, or whether she just thought that they could get to know each other better. He finally decided that she wanted to get to know him, and so on Friday morning he dropped a furl of waterproof paper into her coffee cup. It swum in the dark liquid until she fished it out with her fork, glared at him from across the Great Hall, and mouthed, _We can go wherever we please_ as she read from the paper. She slipped it into her pocket and didn't look at him again for the rest of breakfast.

But she hadn't incinerated it so he considered it a success, overall.

He was sitting in Gryffindor common room that night, trying and failing to read a chapter for Transfiguration, when the portrait hole opened and Lucy climbed through, her skinny jean clad legs appearing first, then the green of her jumper and the point of her chin and the blue of her eyes and the shiny blonde of her hair and Lorcan felt curious as to why he'd never really noticed all of the _pretty_ that made up Lucy Weasley.

He expected her to cross the room to the fire, where James was sitting with Rose and a few others, arguing about Quidditch. Instead, she walked straight toward him.

"Ready?" She was smirking; she looked devilish.

"For what?" Lorcan closed his book.

She pulled out the slip of paper from that morning and let it spiral into his lap. He glanced down at it. "To go wherever we please?"

"Yes. Unless you're in the habit of making empty promises."

"No." He dropped the book on the floor and stood up. "Where should we go?"

"I was thinking Hogsmeade, unless you've got somewhere else in mind?"

"How?" he asked. He had been expecting her to say North Tower or maybe the Forbidden Forest, but she just raised her pale eyebrows at him and headed toward the portrait hole. After a moment, he followed.

She was already halfway to the corner at the far end of the corridor, and he hurried to catch up to her. Without looking at him, she asked, "Haven't you ever snuck out before?"

"I've never really needed to escape."

"Bullshit," she replied. She stopped. They were standing in front of the statue of the one-eyed witch, and she tugged out her wand. "Everyone needs to escape, sometimes." She tapped against the statue and said, "_Dissendium_."

The statue opened and Lucy climbed inside, "Follow in a second," she told him, and the last thing he saw was the bright white of her smile before she disappeared.

He hopped down the slide a few seconds later, and landed at the bottom. "You're lucky I trust you; otherwise I'd be running for my life right about now," he told her as she held out a hand to help him to his feet.

"Yeah, yeah, because clearly I'm the mastermind behind some kidnapping group." She started walking down the dark tunnel and only stopped when she didn't hear his footsteps behind her. "Coming?"

"Where, exactly, are you taking me?"

"Hogsmeade," she said slowly. "Like I said."

"But how do you know...I mean, where on earth did you find out about this?"

Lucy shrugged. "I've got my sources. Come _on_, Lorcan. It's a long walk, and I'm cold."

If he had been a nicer person, he might have offered her his sweatshirt. But he wasn't, and so he just followed her as quickly as he could, squinting into the dark corners for basilisks or giant spiders or death eaters—you never knew what sort of thing might find its way into the world beneath the earth.

They finally came out into the dusty cellar of some building, and Lucy muttered, "Honeydukes," when he looked around in confusion.

She snuck them up through the shop and out into the starlit street, where Lorcan breathed regularly for the first time since she'd appeared in Gryffindor. "That is the most uncomfortable walk I've ever taken."

"It wasn't a _walk_, Lorcan. We were going somewhere."

"So, what, walks don't have destinations?"

"Nope. Walks are aimless; journeys have destinations."

"So this is a journey?" She had started off down the street again, and Lorcan lengthened his stride to catch up.

"Unless you'd like to go off into the hills." She nodded up the street, toward where the Shrieking Shack stood in all its dilapidated tragedy, toward the mountain paths that had featured in the stories that made up both of their childhoods.

"No, journeys are good."

"Okay, then." She took a right into the Three Broomsticks. They stood by the bar and ordered two Butterbeers, which Lorcan insisted on paying for, and then slid into a booth in the far corner.

"Do you just come here whenever you're bored at school?"

"Sometimes." Lucy sipped at her drink. "It's nice to be somewhere different. Other times, I just don't want to deal with family drama." She shook her head. "Of course, that always ends up causing more drama. I really should know better."

Lorcan remembered James's anger and the interruption to his and Dom's snogging sesh nearly two years before. "Yeah, you should."

She rolled her eyes. "So, do you just spend all your time at Hogwarts? What d'you _do_?'

"I go to classes and hang out with people and take wagers on Quidditch matches. Like any sane person."

"Oh, right. Like spending seven years tucked away in a castle is sane."

He shrugged. "I never really had a place before Hogwarts. I travelled around the world with my parents, and so I never settled anywhere. It's nice to stay still for a while."

"Merlin, that sounds heavenly."

"What? Travelling?" It was like she hadn't even listened to a word he said after that.

"Yeah. Getting to know the world in such an intimate way, never needing to find a place, to belong. I must be such a relief."

"It wasn't," he told her, tightening his grip on the Butterbeer bottle. "It was mostly disappointing. We were looking for all these creatures my parents think exist, but after I turned five and realised that I'd never actually _seen_ a nargle, I understood that they were absolutely mad. It took Lysander longer—too long—to come to the same conclusion." He didn't know why he was sharing all of this with her. She hadn't done anything to deserve his secrets. And maybe that was why. She hadn't really made any sign that she wanted to know him, and so he'd decided that she was going to know him. Or maybe the soft blue of her eyes in the dim light of the bar made him want to talk. Or maybe he just wanted her to see that she had it all wrong. "It was just lonely, Lucy. It seemed like there was no one, no one in the _whole world_, who I could connect with. I absolutely hated it."

Her eyes hadn't left his. "And then you came to Hogwarts," she prompted.

"And then I came to Hogwarts, and I found people who didn't even know about nargles, people who dreamed for nothing more than perfect marks or Quidditch wins or lots and lots of sex," her mouth quirked in a half-smile and he half-smiled back, "and it was so much easier to live here. I was so much happier."

"Are you still?" she asked. He blinked. He hadn't anticipated that question.

"Sure. I mean, what would have changed from then until now?"

"You could be bored. Bored with people who only dream about the present, who don't wish for impossibilities and shit like that."

He shrugged. "I still don't see the point in wishing for something impossible. I'm not bored."

She raised an eyebrow. "Okay."

They fell silent as they sipped their drinks, and Lorcan led the way back to Hogwarts, glancing over his shoulder to make sure she was still there, because she was so quiet that she might have vanished into the night without him noticing. But she stayed with him until they reached the corner where she took a right for Ravenclaw.

He said, "Later, Weasley."

"See you, Scamander." Like a promise.

ix. look, it's not that hard  
>(December, 2021)<p>

Lucy smiled at Lorcan when she passed him in the corridors. She nodded and said, "Hey," when she sat with James or Rose or any of the other Gryffindors who occasionally claimed her at mealtimes. But she didn't say anything, and she didn't pass him any notes. She noticed that he almost always had the earbuds from his iPod in his ears, and that his friends occasionally shouted to him to "Turn the fucking thing off," but that he often didn't listen to them.

Lily had told her that Lorcan had come up to her back in September and said that Rose had told him that she was the person to see about Muggle technology. Lily did have sources—Lucy was nearly positive they were illegal—for getting Muggle devices, from mobile phones to electric shavers. But it was Lucy who had sorted out the complex charms to make iPods and mp3s work in the magical world. She had passed the spells to her cousins, and for a while only members of the Weasley/Potter clan had had iPods.

Lucy wasn't sure what Lorcan had said to Lily to get her to help him get an iPod and to teach him how to enhance it, but whatever it was, it must have been convincing, because Lorcan's iPod was fancier than Lucy's, and it must have held at least five times the songs. She wasn't sure why he had bothered Lily for one, but she did wonder what he was listening to all the time. Obviously he had The Smiths and The Beatles, but they didn't have enough songs to keep him occupied twenty-four hours a day. (Well, okay, maybe he didn't spend every second with headphones in his ears. But it was close enough.)

She wasn't sure whether she wanted to know because of her obsession with Muggle music or because she couldn't seem to keep her mind off of him; ever since that night in Hogsmeade, she'd found her mind wandering to what he'd said and how serious and honest he'd looked. She thought about the light in his eyes when he talked about Hogwarts and the twist of his lips when he mentioned his family, about the way his hands had looked as they tightened on his bottle of Butterbeer. She thought about the devastating way he walked, like he had places to be but also like he was seeing the world around him, seeing the cobblestones and the lit windows and the way mist furled around the lampposts, and like all of that seeing and knowledge and purpose settled into his stride. And the way he kept checking over his shoulder, to make sure she was still there, and how he smiled when he saw that she was. Her mind kept running over all of that, and she had never felt so...attached to anyone before, she'd never thought about anyone else so much.

She had no idea where to go next. Or even if it would go anywhere next. So she acknowledged him but she didn't acknowledge that they'd spent any time together.

The second week in December, several weeks after their journey to Hogsmeade, Lucy had pulled _Skylight Confessions_ from the shelves of Muggle books in the library and flipped to the first page to find a note tucked into the spine. She tugged the slip of parchment from the book and smoothed it on the table. _Take these broken wings and learn to fly. Meet me on the Quidditch pitch at midnight. _

"Oh, fuck."

She couldn't have really ignored it. Well, she could have, but Lorcan was sitting several tables over; she'd seen him when she came into the library, and he'd noticed that she'd gotten his note. She could have just gone over and told him, "No," no questions asked, no opportunity for argument.

But then there was this very small part of her that wanted to know him. And that part was shockingly significant and also apparently willing to make an arse of the whole of her. And so Lucy bit her lip and tucked the note in her bag, flipped to the front of the book and ignored the feel of Lorcan's eyes on her back.

She met him on the Quidditch pitch, and he looked mildly surprised. "I didn't think you'd come."

She sighed. "I weighed my options, but I wasn't getting any sleep anyway, so I figured I might as well come out here and die." He smirked; she could see it in the lights from their wands. "Also, I really like that song. So I couldn't just ignore it."

"It's positively brilliant." Lorcan like this, Lorcan enthusiastic and anti-cynical, was rare and it was lovely. "I just love The Beatles. I don't know how I lived my whole life without Muggle music."

"It's something I wonder about the wizarding world every day. Like, how the fuck does everyone respond to when the sun comes out after it's been raining? They can't sing 'Here Comes the Sun', so what can they do?"

"Exactly. There're so many emotions we don't even know how to voice, without that sort of music."

"It's a wonder that wizards even got anywhere in the world, without knowing about The Beatles," Lucy responded, and Lorcan nodded before changing the subject.

"So you know why we're out here, don't you?"

"Unfortunately."

He continued on like he hadn't heard her, "Because I heard from someone—possibly Lily, but please don't kill her—that you've never learned how to fly. That you 'hate it.'" Lucy shifted from her right foot to her left. "Now, I do not pretend to be any sort of flying master. I do, however, have a decent understanding of the concept of flight, and I am quite a capable flier, and therefore, Lucy Weasley, tonight I am going to teach you how to fly."

"But I do not want to learn how to fly," she told him, because it had to be said, even if it would change nothing.

"That, my dear, is complete and utter bullshit. Everyone wants to fly, some people are just too afraid. And because I know that you are a brave Gryffindor at heart, you're going to learn." He leaned down and picked up two broomsticks from the darkness of the grass beneath them. "I borrowed Lysander's broom, because it's better than the school ones and will probably not buck you off."

"Probably?"

"Remember, Luce. Gryffindor at heart." Lorcan handed her one of the broomsticks and demonstrated the first lesson from their first year flying course, which Lucy had made herself sick to get out of. He commanded, "Come on, Lucy, put it down, hold out your hand like this, and say, 'Up'."

She rolled her eyes, dropped the broom unceremoniously to the ground, and demanded, "Up." It didn't move.

"See, it doesn't want me to learn to fly, either. Want to just go on a walk in the Forest?"

"Honestly, you'll brave the bloodthirsty centaurs at midnight, but you won't get on a fucking broomstick?" He sounded upset, and Lucy felt suddenly guilty. It was stupid, because he should have known better, and anyway, it was his fault that they were both out here on the coldest night in December. His fault that their fingers were purple in gloves and their breaths were meeting and crystallizing in the air. His fault that two broomsticks lay among the frost-coated grass. His. But she felt guilty.

"I'm sorry, Lorcan. I just don't understand why this is important to you."

"Because," the word was white in the night, "it's one of the best feelings in the world. I would have thought that you would love it, that you would live for it—it is the ultimate escape. Once you learn how to fly, once you feel the air all around you, once you run your hand through rainclouds and feel snow before it touches the ground—once you've got all that—you can never be tied down again. You can always get away."

The way he described it, it sounded better than heaven. But Lucy had seen too many Quidditch matches, too many arguments over flying between her cousins and her sister, too many bruises and far too many broken bones to be swayed that easily. "Why do you like it so much, then? I thought you liked being settled."

"Well, I'm mostly in it for the pickup Quidditch matches. But, you know, there's more to it than that."

He was trying so hard. Lucy sighed. "Fine." She held out her gloved hand again, said, "Up," and then the broomstick wavered its way up against her palm.

"Hey, good job!" Lorcan sounded almost as surprised as she felt.

"Thank you, sir. Is that all for tonight?"

"Oh, no. I've got you out here, I'm not letting you go until you've gotten off the ground."

"What if I come falling back down?"

"Have a little faith, Weasley." He mounted his broom and demonstrated the proper way to kick off from the ground, so she wouldn't go sliding off the front or the back end of her borrowed broomstick as soon as her toes cleared the grass.

She followed his example, her trainers heavy, her toes stretching stretching until the broomstick was so far from the ground that her toes couldn't touch anymore, and she was floating, her feet inches from the grass, and Lorcan was just a dark shape looping around in the air above her.

She gripped the handle tightly; she felt sweat bloom against her palms and the wood, and she wondered whether Lysander would notice the sweat streaks when Lorcan returned his broomstick. And then Lorcan shouted, "That's not flying, Luce, that's floating. It's easier to keep your balance if you're actually moving."

She leaned forward slightly and lifted the handle a little, and she was jerking up, up, up, and then she hovered opposite Lorcan. He grinned at her. "See? Not that hard."

"Not like that was actually flying."

"You're in the air, right?" She nodded. "You're moving, right?" She shrugged. "You were moving," he told her. "because you got from down there to up here. And therefore you are flying, Lucy Weasley. You are flying."

And then, finally, she smiled at him.

It wasn't over, of course. He kept her out there in the freezing air for another hour, and she fell off once, but he caught her before she hit the ground and the fall—she'd never expected the feeling of falling to be so appealing, but the way the air pushed against her and rushed around her and the complete lack of control she had, well, it wasn't unpleasant. And so she got back on her broomstick and by the end of the hour Lorcan told her, "You're doing good, kid."

"I am, aren't I?"

She'd never known she wanted to fly, but Merlin, now she did.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** I still don't own _Harry Potter_.

x. don't just forget it all  
>(December, 2021)<p>

The night before the start of Christmas hols, Lucy climbed into the Gryffindor common room again. This time Lorcan was sure she was there for him, but she continued past the corner where he sat playing chess with Devon. She collapsed on the floor beside James and Rose, who were playing Exploding Snap and cursing at each other loud enough for the Slytherins to hear them.

Lorcan strained to hear as Lucy said, "James, did you decide whether or not you're going home for Christmas?"

"Yes. I am," James responded.

"And you are too, Rose?" Lucy asked.

"Yeah." Rose didn't sound happy about it. "Lily and Hugo somehow managed to convince Mum and Dad and Uncle Harry to let them stay, and I have no idea how. Because I tried everything. I told them I needed to study and then I told them I needed to stay to make sure Lily and Hugo were okay and Mum and Dad bit my head off at every turn."

"Same," James snorted. "Lily probably came up with some elaborate reason that Mum and Dad were too tired to sort out, so they just gave in." He began shuffling the cards, sending off sparks as he folded them against each other. "It just sucks that they didn't include us in their plans."

"Seriously," Lucy said. "Well, I think I'm staying here." She pulled a stack of wrapped parcels from the bag over her shoulder and set them on the table beside Rose. "Could you give these to everyone for me, please?"

"Why?" James asked, suspicious.

"I've got some stuff I need to sort out, and Molly's spending Christmas with her boyfriend, and Mum and Dad are staying in the States."

"But we're family, too," Rose pointed out. "Don't you want to spend it with us?"

Lucy sighed. Lorcan could feel her frustration from across the room. "I love you guys, and I love spending time with you, and stuff, but I really just need to spend a few days with no classes and no obligations, so I can just, you know, sort out my future, and stuff."

James looked as if he was about to say something else, but Rose kicked him and Lucy stood, brushing her small hands on her jeans. "Okay? So I love you guys, and wish everyone a happy Christmas for me." She kissed Rose's hair and then James's, and waved to Lorcan as she made her way out the portrait hole.

"Hey, Scamander." The tone of Devon's voice told Lorcan that this was not the first time that his friend had called his name. "It's your move."

Lorcan jumped and turned his attention back to the board, directing his knight on a suicide mission.

"So," Devon said, a sneaky grin on his face, "Lucy Weasley, huh? Gotta say, I didn't see _that_ one coming."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Lorcan's knight met a fatal end on the chess board. "I was just thinking."

He didn't run into Lucy until Christmas Eve, when she sat at the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall at lunchtime. "Hey," she said, like they hadn't spent two weeks without speaking. They'd barely even nodded to each other in the corridors since that night with the flying.

"Hi," he said, and if it sounded like a question, well, it sort of was one.

"So I wasn't lying when I told Rose and James that I wanted to stay here and get stuff done, but I'm really tired of being productive. Do you want to do something tonight?"

"Sure." Lorcan took a bite of his steak and ale pie and Lucy waited for him to swallow. "What d'you want to do?"

"Well, I was thinking..." she hesitated. "You remember when you gave me this?" She pulled out the coffee-stained note, the one from the beginning, the one that quoted The Smiths and said: _We can go wherever we please._

"Of course," he said.

"You know, Hogsmeade is a pretty lame place to go. I mean, here you've basically promised me the entire fucking universe, and I take us to the Three Broomsticks? At least I didn't take us to North Tower. That would have been pathetic. But still, Hogsmeade isn't much better."

"Please say you don't want to go to the moon. I don't think we can breathe up there, Luce."

"If I said I did, would you try to build me a space shuttle?"

"A what?" he asked.

"Never mind, never mind. I wasn't thinking the moon, you idiot. I was thinking London."

"That's just as impossible."

"It's not." She leaned forward. "We have three options: one, you Apparate and take me on side-along; two, we take the train out of Hogsmeade; or three, we fly."

"No to one." He glanced over his shoulder at the professors at the head table and lowered his voice. "London is at least two hours' flight away from here, Luce. You've only been on a broomstick once. No offence, but I don't think you're going to be able to handle that."

She smirked. "There's where you're wrong. I've been flying every night since you first taught me. I nicked Lily's broom, because she hates flying more than I used to."

He blinked in surprise. "Okay, fine. But still, two hours there, and then we need to leave our brooms somewhere, and then two hours back. I don't know, Lucy..."

"Come _on_," Lucy begged. "I've never done anything like this before, Lorcan. It'll be fun. It'll be different, and we'll be..." her eyes glowed and all thoughts of saying no disappeared from his mind, "we'll be in London when it turns into Christmas. It'll be so pretty and so alive and just imagine the lights, Lorcan. All the pretty Christmas lights, and all the Muggles getting drunk and singing Christmas carols and all the Christmas trees in the flat windows." She looked at him. "Merlin, Lorcan, it's necessary. It is essential that we have Christmas in London."

"Okay, okay. We'll do it."

"Brilliant!" She stood, most of the food on her plate still uneaten, and grinned down at him. "Meet you on the Quidditch pitch at six?"

"Where're you going?"

"To get ready, obviously. I need to find out which trains go to London, so we can follow the right tracks, and then I need to get a map of London so we know where to go when we get there, and then I need to get dressed." She was at the doors to the Hall when she turned and called, "Dress warmly, Lorcan!"

He waved his glass of pumpkin juice at her and she disappeared. She was insane. He had never expected her to be insane when he first slipped those notes into every single Muggle book on the shelves. But he wasn't sorry that she was insane. London at Christmas—well, who wouldn't want to see it?

They met at the Quidditch pitch, both of them wearing about seventy layers of clothing. They were so puffy that Lorcan was actually surprised both their broomsticks didn't plummet to the ground as soon as they got off the ground. But they didn't, and they were soon shooting through the frost-laden air, their breaths blowing behind them as Lucy led them along the train tracks to London.

There was little chance of them being seen that night, but Lorcan jerked behind cloud cover frequently, whenever he saw the glow from windows or the flash of lights below them. The flight became uncomfortable after the first thirty minutes, and Lorcan paid attention to how he was feeling and to how Lucy looked, whether she was about to wobble from the broomstick or fly too close to the moon; if she showed the barest sign of weakness he would have them back inside the warmth of Hogwarts before she could even protest.

But somehow buildings began appearing below them, and then motorways, and then Lorcan could see the ring of lights that was the London Eye and Lucy sped up, dipping low past Leicester Square, landing on the roof of the shabby Leaky Cauldron, and muttering "_Alohomora_" as she tapped her wand against the attic window. She climbed inside and then held her hand out to Lorcan so he could slide through behind her.

"Do you think anyone saw us?" Lucy asked. They peered down at the masses of Muggles wandering down on Charing Cross Road; none of them _looked_ as if they had just seen two teenagers on broomsticks fly between two buildings and disappear. "Brill," Lucy said. She took her broom and led Lorcan to the stairs, which she hurried down and pressed her ear to the door at their base. She nodded and opened it, and then they were out in the upper hallway of the pub.

The bartender, an astonishingly ugly man named Jim, who had taken over for the former bartender sometime around the time that Tom fell asleep while serving the Minister of Magic a bowl of soup, accepted their broomsticks with a grunt. "I'll keep 'em for you, but make sure you come back for 'em, all right?"

"Of course." Lucy smiled at him.

Lorcan shrugged out of his two top layers—his puffiest jacket and his down vest—and held them out. "Any chance you can keep these as well?"

"Mine too?" Lucy was holding out a pile of scarves and hats and coats, and Lorcan was surprised that she'd managed to fit all of that on without losing all mobility.

"Might as well just buy a room," Jim grumbled, but he stored their clothes with the broomsticks and Lorcan and Lucy stepped through the crowded pub and out into the rush of Muggle London.

"Have you ever been?" Lucy asked, starting to walk down the pavement toward somewhere. He wasn't sure, but he was positive that she had a destination in mind. This was, after all, a journey.

"To London? Just once, and only for a few days." He dodged a Muggle woman wearing a dress that barely covered her arse and heels that could have put a hole through his heart, if she had chosen to direct a kick there. "And when we take the train from Kings Cross, of course."

"Same," Lucy muttered, her eyes following the Muggle woman for a split second before she turned to Lorcan and made a face. "Merlin, that looks uncomfortable. She must be freezing."

"But sexy," Lorcan pointed out, quite validly, he thought, but Lucy responded with a fierce punch to his bicep. If he hadn't still been wearing a heavy jacket, it might have hurt.

"Hey," he rubbed his arm. "What the fuck, Weasley?"

"Rule number one of hanging out with me in public: Do not comment on other girls' 'sexiness'."

"Oh, Weasley, are you jealous?"

"Nope. I just don't like misogynistic pigs."

"Ouch." He was fairly sure that she was joking, but he wasn't positive, so he didn't speak again until she stopped, at the edge of a multi-levelled square, with a wide fountain at the centre and a few statues looming from pillars. There was a gigantic ship-in-a-bottle across the square and as he looked around he felt as if he ought to recognise where they were. But it was Muggle London, and Lorcan had never claimed to know anything about the Muggle world.

"Trafalgar Square," Lucy told him. "And that," she nodded toward the building at the end, with its pillars and dome, "is the National Gallery. We're going there."

"Um, Lucy. I think it's closed."

"We're _wizards_, Lorcan," she murmured. "Well, you are, and I am a witch. Locks and alarms won't stop us."

"This is illegal, Lucy," he protested, following as she dodged tourists taking pictures and lining up outside of restaurants and pubs. She turned to him in the shadow of the boat-in-the-bottle and tapped her wand against his forehead. He felt the liquid chill of a Disillusionment Charm and, still mumbling protests, Disillusioned her as well.

"Brill," she said. "Okay, let's do this."

"Lucy, what happens if we're arrested?"

She rolled her eyes. "We won't be."

"But what if we are?"

"Then we Apparate out of there as quickly as possible, leave the Muggle coppers shaking their heads, return to Hogwarts, and stay out of the Muggle world for a while. Easy." She tapped her wand against the front doors to the gallery, and then cast several charms in a very quick succession, charms which Lorcan had never heard before and doubted that he would ever hear again. Unless, of course, Lucy decided to drag him on another of these outrageous journeys.

But when she pushed the door open and pulled him inside the marble and red-carpet-lined entryway, no alarms went off. Lucy let out a sigh of relief as she shut the door behind them, and Lorcan smirked. "You weren't all that confident, were you?"

"Well, I didn't want you to wimp out." She carefully undid his Disillusionment charm and gestured that he should do the same for her before creeping through the glass doors and looking around at the cavernous emptiness of the dark entrance hall. "Merlin, Lorcan, do you know how lucky we are? Right now, we are surrounded by completely priceless paintings, and we are the only people here."

"You're actually not."

A man stood on the stairs, and as he flicked on his torch Lorcan hissed, "Fuck."

"Oh," Lucy blinked in surprise. "Of course, you Muggles always have night guards, don't you?"

"Us Londoners do." The man stepped down the stairs, his hand drifting toward the silver handcuffs jangling at his side. "Now, don't give me no trouble, and you'll be all right."

"How many of you are there?" Lucy asked.

"Just me and Dill tonight, it being Christmas Eve." The man was actually carrying on a _conversation_ with Lucy, but he was still getting closer to her. Lorcan had quite possibly never been in a stranger situation. Not even when his parents broke into a session of Parliament in Edinburgh, convinced that the nargles were in the chamber.

"Oh, that's too bad you had to work tonight." Lucy smiled guilelessly at him, and only then did Lorcan notice that she had her wand out. He wanted to warn her, to tell her that she was about to do something horribly horribly wrong, but before he could think up a way of reprimanding her without the guard catching on, she muttered, "_Stupefy_," and sent the man to a crumpled mess on the floor.

"So this might not have been my best plan ever," Lucy confessed, reaching forward to carefully rearrange the man so he wouldn't be uncomfortable when he woke up. "We should probably get out of here before Dill comes looking for his mate."

"Yeah, maybe." Lorcan rolled his eyes and followed Lucy back out the door.

"So that's the National Gallery," Lucy said and Lorcan snorted.

"And we didn't even get to see any artwork."

"The whole building's artwork, Scamander, stop being such a downer."

"Okay, okay." They were across Trafalgar Square, and the streets before them led to the Thames. "Want to wander?" he asked. He didn't want her to break into Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London.

"Yeah. Let's wander." She reached for his hand and even though they were wearing gloves he felt closer to her than he had to anyone in a long time, and he wondered whether life could be measured in moments of closeness; whether friendships could be put into overdrive through illegal adventures; whether Stupefying Muggle guards on Christmas Eve was something the Minister of Magic might make inquires about. But he decided that last one didn't matter, because he and Lucy were holding hands (holding gloves, whatever) and walking along the Thames near midnight on Christmas Eve, and the city lights were riding multicoloured on the current, and Big Ben was lit up and the London Eye was still but it was glowing, too, and everything felt very alive, just as Lucy had said it would.

Big Ben chimed just as they were passing over Millennium Bridge, and Lucy stopped at the exact centre and pressed her hands against the metal railing. Lorcan did the same, because he wasn't sure what to do with his right hand when it wasn't holding her left.

"Just look out there, Lorcan." Lucy murmured, her voice nearly reverent beneath the chiming of the clock.

"I am," he told her.

"It's magnificent, isn't it? Positively the most amazing thing ever."

Lorcan asked, "Lucy, why do you read so much?"

She was silent for a moment. "That doesn't have much to do with London or Christmas or the Thames."

"It sort of does. Because here we are, in London, and we just broke into the National Gallery, which, okay, didn't work out perfectly, but still, and it's all been you, Lucy. You're the one who's made us do all of this. And so I don't understand why you spend so much time reading, when you could spend your time _doing_."

"I love books, though." She was still looking at the water, but he was looking at her, and her eyes were vivid with London lights and her hands were curled over the metal and her freckles were barely visible and she was beautiful and she was honest. "I love doing stuff like this, but I love books. They're sort of separate—the doing and the reading. It's just," and then she looked up at him and then she looked away, "I've never really had anyone I wanted to do all this stuff with, before you."

"Oh." He wanted to say something else, but he didn't know quite what to say, so he just looked back at the water and they stood in silence for a moment before Lucy turned and started walking again. He caught up to her and took her hand, and they stepped down the stairs to the other bank in silence, but then Lorcan pushed her beneath the bridge, back against the railing over the Thames, and he looked at her and looked at her until she closed her eyes.

And then he kissed her because he couldn't think of what he wanted to tell her, but he knew he wanted to tell her _something_. And so he pressed his lips against hers.

She didn't respond at first. She was still and her lips did not move and when he pulled back she was staring at him, her eyes wide.

He'd never felt so rejected in his life. He started to turn, but then she breathed, "No," and she reached out and took his chin in her gloved hand and she stood on tiptoe and kissed him. And it was by no means the best kiss of his life and they were both wearing far too many layers so it felt like they were teddy bears below the neck, but their lips were touching and then their tongues were touching and it was Christmas and they were in London and he was holding—he was kissing—Lucy Weasley, so none of that mattered, not really, not at all.

They got back to Hogwarts when the sun was just on the verge of coming up over the hills, and they were silent as they climbed the empty steps to the front doors and crept inside and headed up the stairs.

"See you," Lucy said as she turned to go to Ravenclaw.

Lorcan grabbed at her hand and squeezed it lightly before he responded, "Tomorrow."

She nodded and hurried to her dormitory, and he continued to his, where he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep before he could toe off his boots.

He woke up when the light falling through the dormitory window was dim with the heaviness of the late afternoon, and he sat up just long enough to strip off several layers of clothing and curl up beneath his duvet. He slept all night and into the next morning, and finally felt alive enough to move when the clock read nine.

Lucy wasn't in the Great Hall when he got to breakfast, but there was a slip of paper at every seat at the Gryffindor table, and Lorcan leaned down to read one, seeing Lucy's neat cursive handwriting and reading, _Under the iron bridge we kissed_.

And it didn't matter that the other three Gryffindors who were spending Christmas there kept glancing at the notes in confusion, and it didn't matter that Lily and Hugo had their heads together at the Slytherin table. Lorcan took one of the slips of paper and went to find Lucy, so they could kiss on her bed and in the corridor and by the Lake. So they could kiss in places never even imagined in songs.

xi. can't we just be us  
>(January, 2022)<p>

They didn't act that differently around each other. Okay, so sometimes they found themselves in broom cupboards, or on the Quidditch pitch, or even in the tunnel to Hogsmeade, and then suddenly they were kissing again, and learning each other, and it seemed to Lucy that she'd never really felt quite as good as she did when she had her hands on Lorcan's back or her lips on Lorcan's lips or her legs tangled with Lorcan's legs.

When everyone returned to school at the beginning of January Lorcan ran into Lucy just after lunch, and he said, "Walk with me?" over the noise of the crowds around them.

Lucy shook her head and stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans. "Later, Lorcan," she muttered, hurrying after a group of Ravenclaws.

It wasn't that she wasn't happy with him; quite the opposite. She just didn't want to start rumours or to have her family wondering about them and thinking about them and questioning her about them. She wanted there to be a them, but she didn't want anyone else to know.

Lucy found Lorcan in the library that night, and she sat down across from him at his table. He glanced up from his book and then looked back down at it; one of the three times she had seen him actually reading in the library.

"What're you doing?" Lucy asked.

"Revising," he muttered. Like he wanted her to go away.

"Can we talk?"

"I'd rather not."

"Lorcan," she sighed. "Lorcan. I don't want my family to know about us. You know how they are."

"They care about you, Lucy. Merlin, why're you so against them caring?"

"Because they care too much. I wish they wouldn't think anything of me; I wish they would let me live the way I want to, without any sort of preconceived notions of how I'm _supposed_ to live."

"So, what, you'll just hide everything from them until it's too late to hide it all?"

"That's a plan. It's not ideal, obviously, but I'd really like to be us without them, Lorcan. It was working so well."

"I just don't get it, though, Luce. I don't get why you don't want them to know."

"Because they'll try to interfere. And I've been happy without them being involved."

He finally looked up at her. He closed his book and nodded. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah, okay."

She grinned at him. "Brilliant. Fancy going to Hogsmeade?"

He shook his head. "Not tonight. Tonight," he tapped a finger against his book, "tonight I need to read about the potions I was supposed to learn last term."

"Okay." Lucy stood. "I'll go then, so I don't distract you."

"Hogsmeade tomorrow night, though?" Lorcan asked, just before she left.

"Yeah, that sounds good."

They went to Hogsmeade three nights in a row, and by then even Lucy was getting tired of Butterbeer. She suggested North Tower to Lorcan the next night, and he laughed and nodded, because it was required of all Hogwarts students to sneak off to North Tower at some point.

But when she got there at midnight, Lorcan wasn't there. There was a note Spellotaped to the wall, by the window that overlooked the Forest. She tugged it down and read: _I hope you see that I / Would love to love you_.

She sighed. He was insufferable, always asking for something more. What they had was working perfectly. Perfectly. He didn't need to complicate it by adding four letter words to the equation.

She heard footsteps on the stairs and tucked the note in her pocket, smiling as she turned to face him. Lorcan didn't ask her about the note; that had never been their way. When he kissed her lightly she said, "It's getting better since you've been mine." And that was the only response he would get—he had to know that. Had to understand, because otherwise they'd never work.

He kissed her and murmured, "Same, Luce, same."

They could ignore his desire to love for a little while, she decided.

xii. we've gone and we're going  
>(February 2022)<p>

Lorcan was tired of Hogsmeade and broom cupboards and North Tower—especially North Tower, because sometimes they happened upon other people there. He wanted to hold Lucy's hand in public again, to kiss her against a brick wall on a city street, to see her in the day and be able to run a hand through the sunlit strands of her hair. He wanted London again.

But London was far away and classes were in session; someone would notice if they flew off to England. Lorcan spent a few afternoons in the library, with atlases and guidebooks spread on a table and a list of slowly decreasing places beside his elbow. It took him three days, but he finally found somewhere.

He scribbled out a frantic note to Lucy at seven in the morning on the second Friday in February: _Ease your feet off in the sea_. He floated the note into her bag at breakfast, and waited for her response.

She didn't get back to him until lunch, when she sat beside James at the Gryffindor table and tossed a crumpled piece of paper at him. _You've got sand all over your feet._ And then, _The beach? Where? When?_

He dropped his response on her plate. _Tomorrow? 10 a.m. 30 minutes east of here._

She didn't send him another note, but he knew that she'd meet him on the Quidditch pitch the next morning. Nothing would keep Lucy from adventuring.

She arrived a little after ten, though, and Lorcan had started to worry that she'd decided that she didn't want to risk the cold to go with him. But then she was sprinting across the grounds, Lily's broom held in one hand and the other trying to tie a scarf around her neck.

"Sorry, Lorcan, sorry!" she said in a rush of breath. "I forgot to grab my jacket before I came out so I had to go back for it."

"No worries." He grinned. "Ready?"

"Let's go see the ocean." Her smile was almost painful to see, it was so brilliant. He had never thought he'd be able to make anyone that happy, let alone Lucy Weasley.

She followed him this time, up through the air and straight east from the castle. It wasn't quite as cold as Christmas Eve had been, and the flight was much shorter than the flight to London, so they were much less sore when they landed in a crop of trees beside the rocky shore. The town they'd landed in was small, but Lorcan had seen an abandoned shed when they flew over it, and he led Lucy there. They hid their brooms and extra layers inside the dilapidated building before magically locking the partially rotten door and winding their way past fish and chips shops and cottages, until they saw the ocean.

The waves were low and the air was still, and Lucy grabbed onto Lorcan's hand and inhaled deeply. He followed her example and grinned when she said, "Merlin, it smells like heaven."

They walked onto the rocks, careful to keep their balance as they climbed over the boulders and stones and knelt to examine furls of seaweed caught in the cracks, left there from the latest high tide. "This is perfect," Lucy finally said. "Where did you find this place?"

"I've been doing some research. The library has a shocking number of travel guides."

"Of course they do." Lucy shook her head. "Thank you," she said suddenly, turning to look at him. She was standing on a rock a little lower than the one Lorcan sat on, and her hair was swept away from her face by a sudden sea breeze. Her eyes met his and she looked free.

"I'm just glad you like it here," he told her, although it was a lie. Or maybe stretching the truth because he was not "just" anything; he was happy that she had come here with him and that she was smiling at him and that she looked free and he also thought he was probably in love with her and he might have been able to tell her that, in that moment, but then she leapt from her perch and landed beside the waves, her arms outstretched to catch at all the particles of salt in the air, her voice a bright star in the daylight as she cried something to the waves, something Lorcan couldn't hear.

And then she turned around again and called to him, "Come on, Lorcan, you can't just stand there and watch the water and watch the sky; you've got to experience it!"

He only hesitated a moment before he toed off his sneakers and his socks and made his way across the rocks to join her at the point where the water met the land. Their toes were purple, but they had come to the ocean and they had the water beneath their feet, lapping at their ankles, and they needed nothing but the waves and the salt in the air and each other. Lorcan wrapped an arm around Lucy's shoulders, and she leaned her blonde head back against him. They stood together and watched as the water iced their veins.

"Lucy," Lorcan murmured, sending strands of her hair up into the sky with the word.

"Lorcan." She'd tucked her hand in his back pocket and he could feel her tense.

"Can I tell you something?"

She had to know what was coming, so he was almost surprised when she said, after a moment, "Please."

"I've never done this before," and it was sad that, for all the girls he'd been with, he'd never even thought it, "so I don't know whether there's a right way to do it, but I want you to know that I love you."

She didn't pull away from him. "You came with me to London and you took me to the ocean and you like Muggle music." He wasn't entirely sure if this was going where he wanted it to but he let her go on. "And you taught me how to fly. I think you might be a miracle worker, Lorcan Scamander. And yeah, I love you, too."

"Yeah?"

She pulled away from him then, but only so that she could kiss him. They broke apart when the waves reached the ends of their rolled-up jeans. "Want some fish and chips?" Lorcan asked, after they'd slipped their socks back on over their numb feet.

"And hot chocolate." Lucy led the way from the shore, and Lorcan walked a little behind her, admiring how strong she looked and how little she was and thinking about how he'd never really thought he'd ever fall in love.

xiii. this time we've loved  
>(March 2022)<p>

They were sitting next to each other in the library while spring rains washed the windows and Lorcan tried to study for NEWTS. It wasn't working particularly well, because Lucy's foot was rubbing against his shin.

She had her head down on her forearm while she read, although she hadn't turned the page in several minutes and Lorcan was staring straight ahead, so she didn't think either of them was getting any sort of work done.

She slipped a sheet of paper over to him. It was empty except for one line at the top: _I'll do anything to be happy._

It was just a quote from a song. She was biting her lower lip, and she nervously returned his gaze when he turned to look at her. He clearly had no idea what she'd meant by that quote, and tapped his quill against his chin before he wrote: _I gave myself to sin / And I've been there and back again_ beneath her neater handwriting.

She took the paper back from him and nodded, like what he'd written made perfect sense. And then she scribbled: _Tonight's the kind of night where everything could change._

Lucy heard the catch in Lorcan's breath when he read that. He glanced at her and when she nodded slightly he pressed his quill against the paper and very, very slowly, wrote: _I'd like to see your underwear._

She grinned at him and added: _My celibate days are over_ to the page. And then she stood and he didn't hesitate before closing his book, snatching the incriminating paper from the table and following her from the library.

She led him to Ravenclaw, and they passed Hugo and Lily in the common room but Lucy didn't even wave to them. Her dormitory was empty when they reached it, and she locked the door as soon as they were inside, and then pressed herself up to kiss Lorcan back against her bed.

"Hey." Lorcan gripped her arms and pushed her away, so he could look down into her blue eyes and try to read her. "You don't want to do it like this."

"What do you mean? Of course I do." She was fighting hard to keep her face impassive.

"But...I mean..." his face was suddenly red and Lucy fought a smile at his discomfort, "aren't you a virgin?"

"And trying very hard to change it, at the moment," she ground out.

"But, don't you want your first time to be, like, in a bed of roses or there to be chocolate or champagne or...or something?" He trailed off because Lucy had started laughing.

"Lorcan, it is just sex. Merlin."

"But it's...sort of...I don't know, significant, isn't it?"

"It's inevitable." She shrugged. "Maybe it is significant, but at the moment I'm mostly concerned about it happening. And I want to happen right now, with you, and please no roses or champagne or chocolate. I just want you, Lorcan, okay?"

He opened his mouth to say something; maybe to argue again, and she cut in. "And will you please stop making this even more awkward than it already is?"

He smirked at her. "Fine, Lucy Weasley, I'll have sex with you. You don't have to beg."

"Apparently, I do." But he cut off her complaint with a kiss. He kept his hands on her waist as they stumbled their way back to her bed, and his fingers were light against the button on her jeans and the clasp on her bra and hers fumbled at the hem of his shirt and moved more adroitly against the zipper of his jeans.

It was just skin and just them, and actually a lot more awkward at first than their conversation, and Lorcan kissed the skin along the angle of her neck and she dug her nails into his back because _fuck_, this hurt, he was hurting her—and then, somehow, the pain was pleasure or maybe the pleasure was pain or maybe she really needed to stop thinking because Lorcan was there and their skin was close close closer and _oh_, she never wanted to lose him, not ever, not ever.

xiv. there ought to be some hellos  
>(April, 2022)<p>

Lucy stood in the Great Hall, waiting for the carriages arrive to take her to Hogsmeade Station so she, and half the other students in the school, could catch the train to King's Cross for Easter hols. Lorcan had her hand in his, but he was watching the door.

"I'll miss you," he told her.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll be back in a week."

"But that's so _long_," he whined. "Can't you just stay here?"

"Mum and Dad want me to come home, and...I miss it there, Lorcan."

"I know, I know." The headmaster appeared in the doorway and ushered the students nearest out to the entranceway. "Fine. But I'll see you in a week?"

"Seven days," Lucy promised, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. "Start the countdown," she added, as she turned away, gripping her rucksack and crossing the Great Hall. James met her at the doors to the Castle; he was the only other of her cousins to be going home during the hols; Rose, Roxy, and Al were all too busy studying for OWLS to even consider it, and Lily had laughed outright when she received a note from her father asking that she think about going home in April. Hugo, of course, stayed because Lily was staying.

It was the first time Lucy wanted to stay, but her parents had practically begged her to come home. So she was spending one night at the Burrow, and Flooing from there to her childhood home in Massachusetts. James was spending the night at the Burrow, as well, before he went to his parents' house.

Lucy and James sat in nearly complete silence on the train, until she finally asked, "So why are you even coming home, James?"

He shrugged. "I needed to talk to Molly, and I figured going home was the easiest way to do it."

Lucy raised her eyebrows. "You couldn't have just sent her an owl? Or Flooed her? How do you even know you'll see her?"

"She's coming tonight. I thought you knew."

"No," Lucy looked out the window. Buildings were appearing beyond the smeared glass; they were almost in London. "I didn't know that."

She should have guessed, though. Of course her grandmother would plan some extravagant family meal, when did she miss the opportunity to bring everyone together? It wasn't that Lucy didn't want to see her sister, and whichever of her older cousins her grandmother managed to attract with the promise of good food, it was just that she wasn't sure how to broach the whole _Lorcan_ topic. Maybe she wouldn't bring it up.

But that night, after a loud and overwhelming family dinner, after Lucy had disappeared to her bedroom, Molly knocked at the door. She was alone, and Lucy sat up in bed, crossing her legs to make room for her older sister.

Molly sat down at the end of her bed and picked at a loose thread on the cuff of her cardigan.

"How's work, Moll?" Lucy asked. Her sister was working at a pub while trying to find work as a reporter; none of the newspapers were hiring, not even girls with red hair and famous last names.

"All right." Molly bit her lip. "I need to talk to you about something."

"Is everything okay?" Her sister looked like she might have some dangerous secret. Molly had always been the one to get in trouble, but Lucy had never been the one to get her out of it, and she wondered why they were even talking. .

"I hope so." Molly inhaled and then said in a rush, "Look, James just told me that you and Lorcan Scamander are dating and that he thinks it's getting serious and I want to know—is it?"

Lucy stiffened. Why had James never learned to keep his fucking mouth shut? "I guess." She moved away from Molly and reached to clutch her pillow to her stomach. Molly still wasn't looking at her.

"And this is Lorcan, right? The Gryffindor one? James wasn't just being an imbecile and mistaking Lysander for Lorcan?"

"Merlin, yeah. It's Lorcan."

"When did it start?" And then Molly looked at her, and her eyes threatened a fight.

"In the fall sometime, I don't remember. What's going on, Molly? Why do you care?"

"He's an arse, Lucy, and I don't want you to get hurt."

Lucy straightened, her fingers gripping the fabric of her pillowcase in fists. "You don't even know him." Her voice was so low it almost broke and Molly blinked at her. She'd never fought back before.

"I do, though. I was at Hogwarts with him for six years, Lucy, and he's an arse. We were in the same house, and, Merlin, the number of times I wanted to curse him. The number of times I _did_ curse him."

"But that was a year ago," Lucy pointed out, trying to keep her voice steady.

"_Just_ a year ago. He can't have changed who he is in a year."

"I know him, Molly. _I_ know him. He is not any more of an arse than we are. Would you just...would you please just go?"

Molly stood, but she hesitated by Lucy's desk, near the door. "Look, I know you think you know him. Maybe you know part of him, or something. But will you just...will you watch this?" She placed a glass vial on the desk. It was full of swirling silver gaseous liquid: a memory. Lucy recognised it from a Defence class where Professor Lupin had shown them some old duels at Hogwarts back in the mid-nineteenth-century, so they could examine how duelling had changed in the seventy or so years since. She stared at it.

"Dad has a Pensieve. It's in his office. Don't look at his memories," Molly shook slightly, "but you can use it to watch this one." She brushed some hair out of her eyes. "Just please watch it."

For some reason, Lucy didn't break the vial and let the memory float off into the ether. Later she wished she had. Instead, she bundled it in a blue scarf and stuffed it in her rucksack. She hadn't decided whether she was going to watch it or not, but she'd have the option, she decided. She'd keep the option.

She stepped out of the fireplace in her childhood living room to find her mom waiting for her with a glass of iced tea and an uncomfortably long hug.

"Hey, Mum." Lucy pushed from her mom's arms and took the iced tea, sipping it so she had a moment not to speak.

Audrey took the silence and ran with it. "So, your father is home today but he'll be going to work tomorrow and Saturday to make up for it so I thought we'd all have a nice dinner tonight—I've made reservations at the Olive Garden, is that okay?—and then I thought maybe tomorrow you and I could go shopping? I haven't been able to buy you any new clothes in a while, and then—oh, do you need a haircut? Because I'm getting one tomorrow and I'm sure Jan could squeeze you in if you need one and—"

"Breathe, Mum," Lucy interrupted. "I'm here for a week, we don't need to do everything in one day."

"You're right, you're right. And you need to get settled. I'm sorry, it's just so nice to have you home again."

"And it's nice to be home again. Olive Garden sounds wonderful for dinner tonight, and I don't need a haircut but I'll come with you tomorrow. I don't need any new clothes, though."

Audrey smiled and took her daughter's rucksack, leading the way to her bedroom. "Just let me treat you this once, Luce."

Her first two days at home, Lucy didn't spend more than five minutes out of her mother's company (except, of course, when she was sleeping, and she woke up on Monday morning to find her mother dusting the shelves in her room, like that was normal).

Monday evening, though, her mother's best friend invited her out for dinner, and Lucy declined the invitation, pleading exhaustion and jetlag. But she wasn't really all that tired. She sat in her room, trying to read, but found herself glancing repeatedly toward the rucksack she'd tucked beneath her desk. The vial with Molly's memory still sat in it, and she slid from her bed and inched across the room, approaching her bag like it was a snake, liable to bite.

She pulled the vial from the pocket on the side and tipped it so the haze of silver pressed against one side and then the other. "It's not like it'll change anything," she told herself. This would have been a fine argument, really, if she hadn't still felt her pulse rush at the thought of seeing it. Of seeing Lorcan the way other people saw him.

She snuck down the hall, even though she knew her house was empty, and carefully undid the Charms on her father's study door. The Pensieve was in the cupboard, the one that had always been kept carefully locked during her childhood, and Lucy searched for the key for a few minutes before she found it tucked beneath the cushion in the armchair in the corner. And then she hesitated before unlocking the cupboard and before lifting the stone basin from the cupboard. But she didn't hesitate before pouring Molly's memory and filling the pool with silver. She didn't hesitate before lowering her face until her nose brushed the surface and she fell back to Hogwarts, two years before.

She landed behind a row of red heads. Her cousins stood clustered in the corridor just outside of Gryffindor and—_fuck_. There, just beyond the Fat Lady, Dominique had Lorcan against the wall. Maybe that was the wrong way of putting it, actually. The two of them were so entangled that it would have been a challenge to say who had whom.

Lucy's cousins and sister had frozen in the corridor and Molly nudged Fred, who shook his head and muttered, "No way in hell am I breaking that up."

And then James, because it always had to be James, said, "Dominique!" From Lucy's angle he didn't sound upset, but the way his right hand was gripping his left wrist behind her back made her wonder how well he kept his emotions hidden.

And then she turned her attention back to Lorcan, to Lorcan's face when the others explained that she, Lucy, was missing, to Lorcan's face when Dominique pulled away from him, to his face when Dominique ordered him to get Louis. She didn't see Lorcan, though. She saw a guy who wanted to shag her cousin.

She landed back in her father's study, nearly two years later, and she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood.

It was stupid to be upset. Lorcan had been somebody before he knew Lucy—he had been a personality, someone who was a feature of everyone's story at some point. She thought back to that list she had written out when he slipped the first note in _Her Fearful Symmetry. _She had called him a man-whore, hadn't she? So why the fuck did it bother her so much to see him and Dom forever ago?

She returned Molly's memory to the bottle and the Pensieve to the cupboard and locked the doors behind her, and then she went downstairs, scribbled a note to her parents, and grabbed her raincoat before leaving her house and wandering down the gloomy street.

She kept trying to argue herself back to a rational place. But jealousy felt irrational and she was horribly jealous of the way Lorcan had been touching Dom, horribly hurt by the way he didn't even seem to care that Lucy had gone missing again, even though she'd always thought her cousins' and sister's reactions to be utterly unnecessary.

If she were being honest, though, Lucy admitted that the problem, the real problem, lay more with her own past than with Lorcan's.

He had had so many girls. Dominique and others. And she had just had him. He had been every single one of her firsts, and she had been none of his. And that made her feel inexperienced and stupid and different, and she hated it.

She had reached the Ice Cream Shack, a small building on the corner of High Street and Main Street, with two sliding glass windows spotted with rainwater and an outdated list of flavours stapled to the wood-siding. She stood staring at the scribbled words, her eyes flicking between Strawberry and Moose Tracks, without really seeing them.

"Hey? You ready to order?"

The girl behind the glass had a scoop in her hand, dripping water onto the counter, and Lucy glanced one last time at the list before saying, "Um, yeah, just a cone of...um...Mint Chip?"

"Sugar?"

"Sorry?" Lucy stuck her hand in her jeans pocket and tugged out a few rumpled bills—Muggle American money always threw her.

"Sugar cone?"

"Oh, yeah."

She exchanged two bills for the already-dripping cone and then wandered down the street a little, catching at the runny green ice cream with her tongue before it landed on her hand.

Footsteps pounded on the pavement behind her, and she stepped to the side, expecting some fanatical high school cross country star to continue past her on his path to athleticism, but instead the noise stopped in a rapid two-three step right beside her and she peeked around the edge of her hood to see a semi-familiar face peering out of his own raincoat.

"Lucy?" The semi-familiar lips moved, crinkling semi-familiar lines into this semi-familiar guy's forehead. "Lucy Weasley?"

She got there. "Seth? Oh, Mer—God. Seth!"

"Lucy! Hi!" And then he reached out for what would undoubtedly have been the most awkward hug of both of their lives, but Lucy held up her dripping cone, by way of both an explanation and a shield, and grinned up at him.

"Hi," she stepped back, so she was standing on the bank of grass and looking down at him. "How are you?"

"I'm good, I'm good." He shook his head. "My God, I can't believe it's you. What're you _doing_ here?"

"It's Easter holidays at my school, and my parents wanted me to come home. So here I am." She shrugged. "What have you been up to?"

"For the past six years? You know, sadly, not all that much."

She laughed. He had grown up. His hair, which she remembered buzzed so close to his scalp that it could have blond or it could have been black, no one would have been able to tell, hung drenched and dark around his face, long enough to leak rainwater into his brown eyes. His lips were chapped and thinner than Lorcan's and he had the beginnings of a beard around his sharp chin and he was shockingly attractive, considering that the last time she had seen him he had had chocolate smeared on his cheeks and had given her a broken mood ring.

"How about you?"

"Oh, you know, just school and stuff."

He looked at her and she felt suddenly uncomfortable. "You certainly stayed pretty, Lucy Weasley."

She could feel her cheeks heat with a blush, but she managed to say, "You certainly turned pretty, Seth Chambers."

"Oh, stop!" His hands fluttered girlishly to his cheeks and he winked at her when he dropped them a second later. "So what've you been up to since you got back to town?"

"My mother has not let me out of her sight," Lucy confessed. "I only escaped tonight because she got invited out by someone else."

"God, that must be fun."

"It was at first. Now I'm about ready to run away."

They'd started moving at some point, and Lucy felt his eyes on her as she walked beside him. "Hey," he said, "My parents are out of town for the night, and I'm having a party at my place. Any chance you want to come?"

She looked up at him. His gaze was serious. He had called her pretty and Lorcan had had Dom. So Lucy said, "Yeah, that'd be great. I'll come by around eleven?"

"Sounds good," he grinned at her and took a right where his street hit High Street. Lucy waved after him and continued home, where she tossed the rest of her melted, soggy cone in the sink and ditched her jacket by the stairs. She went up to her room and opened the door to her closet, and then she stood there and stared at her clothes.

She hated parties. She hated sweating and she hated human heat and she hated booze and she really hated the way drunk people fell over themselves and over her. She hadn't gone to many, although Lorcan had brought her to enough for her judgements to be justified. And here she was, voluntarily attending a _Muggle_ party. Something must have been seriously wrong with her.

After deciding that she had absolutely nothing to wear, Lucy searched through Molly's closet until she found a suitably sparkly and low-cut black top and ripped skinny jeans. She slipped her feet into spangled flats and crawled into bed, setting her alarm for 10:30 and trying not to think about Lorcan or Seth or anything but her pillow and sleep.

That didn't work, of course, and her thoughts circled between Lorcan and Seth until her alarm chimed and she rolled out of bed, straightened her hair, and crept down the stairs and out the front door. It had stopped raining, and by the time she got to Seth's the music was playing loud enough to hear down the street and the lights were glowing out fierce into the darkness. She wondered how soon it would be before the neighbours called the cops, and then mounted the steps and pushed the door open.

"Lucy!" Seth grabbed her wrist immediately and led her through the crowd, shouting out her name to the few people who weren't drunk enough to think that they knew her. He eventually left her in the kitchen, by the fridge, where she sipped at a lukewarm Keystone Light and tried to look inconspicuous.

"Hi!" A brown-haired girl threw one arm around Lucy's shoulder and hugged her. "Oh, my God, Seth told me you were back but I didn't believe it. Oh, my God! Hi!"

Lucy searched her memory. Maddie. Maddie, the girl who had believed in the man on the moon. "Hi, Maddie!" Lucy had to shout over the music, but Maddie was so drunk that it wouldn't have mattered if she'd kept silent. The other girl kept talking.

"Lucy, you were always my favourite, you know? I was so sad when you left to go away to school. I thought that it just wasn't fair that you got to go off to Scotland or wherever while the rest of us were stuck here without you! How've you been?" But she didn't pause for Lucy to answer. "God it's so boring here, you don't even know. I'm so jealous of you, you must have had some really great adventures and—oh, my God, I love this song, come on!" And then she grabbed Lucy's hand and practically hauled her into the mass of high schoolers.

Lucy's agony didn't last long, though. She managed to slip away from Maddie and through the bodies until she reached the side door, which she shoved open with her hip and breathed in the heavy scent of springtime mixed with the sweeter smoke of marijuana.

Whoever was smoking pot must have been on the back porch, though, because the side one was empty, and Lucy crossed the small deck, tapping her mostly full beer can against the railing as she watched the fireflies glow in spurts and fizzles.

The door creaked behind her after a few minutes, but she didn't turn around.

"Hey." Seth leaned against the railing next to her. "You okay?"

She turned to smile up at him. "Yeah, of course."

"Not a big partier?"

"Not particularly." Lucy tilted her beer can so a little dribbled out and spilled onto the puff-ball dandelions that grew below the deck. "Surprised?"

He laughed. "Not particularly." And then, out of nowhere, he reached out and took her right hand in his. He held it up to the dim porch light and squinted at the ring on her index finger. "Hey, is that the one I gave you?"

She was silent a moment. Then, "Yeah."

"God, I can't believe you kept that. I can't believe you still wear it. Does it still work?"

She laughed. "No. It never actually did. Apparently I'm emotionless."

"I've always thought you were just too complex for mood rings. A real person, you know?"

She didn't, because that sounded like utter gibberish but she nodded anyway. "Thanks, I think."

"Oh, it's definitely a compliment. You are real, Lucy Weasley. Remember how when we were six and we were in kindergarten and we had that wedding beside the swings at recess?"

"Yes. You gave me the plastic ring off an orange juice container and I gave you a weed tied in a knot so it was almost like a ring and Maddie was our minister and I used a Kleenex as a veil."

"Yes, that wedding." He was looking at her, now, just looking at her, and she could feel nerves building in her veins, pressing into her chest and accelerating her heart rate. She shouldn't have been doing this. This whole conversation, this party, this boy—it was all wrong. But she stayed and looked back at him. "I've always been sort of sad about it."

"Why's that?"

"Because at the end, when Maddie pronounced us husband and wife, you turned and got on a swing and started swinging, and Charlie gave me a cootie shot because I'd been so close to you, and that was the end of it."

"It was." Lucy grinned. "I didn't even keep the ring."

"But I always wanted to kiss you." He said it in a rush, and Lucy froze. She should have told him. She could have just said, "I have a boyfriend." She could have said, "I'm in love with someone else." She could have said, "But you don't even _know_ me. You never even knew me."

She didn't say any of those things. Instead, she asked, her voice soft, "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

And then she said, "Well, I think we might be a little better at it now."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

And he kissed her. His mouth was unfamiliar and his tongue felt heavy and out-of-place and he was scratchy and he was too hesitant and too tall and he was not Lorcan.

She pulled away. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

"Lucy?" He backed up a step, his eyes shadowed and hurt. "I'm sorry, was that—?"

"No, Merlin, I'm such an idiot."

"Merlin? I'm not—," he stepped even further away from her.

"I'm so sorry, Seth. I'm so sorry. I have a boyfriend and I'm just...oh, God, I'm such a bitch. I'm sorry." She didn't look at him and she didn't say anything else before she pushed back through the door and the crowd until she reached the front door, where she jumped the three steps from the front porch to the ground and started running.

She got to her house and she took the stairs two at a time, and then she was in her bathroom and fumbling through her drawer until she found her toothbrush and toothpaste. She brushed her teeth until she spat blood, and then she gargled with stinging mouthwash and climbed into the bathtub, running burning hot water over her jeans, feeling no heat but feeling stupid and dirty and wrong. She had hot tears on her cheeks and she fumbled at her index finger until the ugly broken mood ring was off and she chucked it at the faucet. It fell into the water and spun multicoloured in the heat of the water and Lucy couldn't see through her tears anymore.

She peeled off her soaking clothes and fell asleep in the bathtub with the water still running steaming down the drain. She woke up and shut off the faucet when the water ran cold and then again the next morning to a knock on the bathroom door.

"Lucy? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." Her voice sounded strange.

"Are you going to come down for breakfast?"

"Yeah." One syllable words seemed to be all she could manage. She climbed out of the tub and scrubbed at her stiff legs with the towel, and then pulled on leggings and a sweatshirt before dumping her still-wet clothes from the night before in the hamper and heading downstairs.

Both of her parents sat at the table, reading half of the _Boston Globe_ each, and Lucy poured herself a mug of coffee before she managed to force herself to speak.

"Can I go back to Hogwarts early?"

Her parents dropped their papers and stared at her. "What?" her father asked.

"Can I go back to Hogwarts early?" she repeated. "I just...I'd really like to get some more work done, and I realised that a lot of books I need are in the library and I'd...I'd just really like to go back."

Her parents glanced at each other. "We miss you around here, Lucy."

"I know, Mom, I do. But I really think I need to be at school right now. Please?"

They looked at each other again. "Okay," her mom sighed. "You can probably just Floo through to your grandparents', and then send an owl to the headmaster and then you can head up there when he gets back to you."

"Thank you!" Lucy dropped a kiss on each of her parent's heads and then ran upstairs and repacked her rucksack, before running back to the fireplace, tossing on some Floo powder, and disappearing before her parents could change their minds.

She hadn't Flooed to her grandparents' the way her parents had told her to; she had taken the fire straight to Honeydukes, and she earned a few strange glances when she fell out into the crowd in the shop. She waited until the customers had forgotten about her, and then slipped down into the cellar and through the trapdoor and through the dark tunnel to Hogwarts.

Lily caught sight of her when she was hurrying past the suit of armour on the second floor and called, "Hey, Luce, I thought you were at home."

"I was, I came back."

Lily shrugged and was about to continue when Lucy asked, "Hey, do you happen to know Gryffindor's password?"

"Of course. It's 'Drink Responsibly'. I think the Fat Lady had a bit of an off weekend."

"Cheers." Lucy hurried on.

She found Lorcan in his dormitory, lying on his bed listening to his iPod.

"Lucy?" He jerked the earphones out of his ears. "What's wrong? What're you doing here?"

"I fucked up. I...I really fucked up, Lorcan. I kissed somebody."

He froze, half-sitting on his bed, and then said, "Sorry?"

"I'm so so sorry Lorcan. I'm so sorry."

He stuck his headphones back in and pressed play; the light on the iPod glowed bright for a moment and he closed his eyes, breathing slowly. She could see his lips moving; he was counting to ten.

Then he said, along with the music, "No more apologies / I'm too tired, I'm so very tired / and I'm feeling very sick and ill today / but I'm still fond of you." He took the headphones out again and tossed his iPod to the side, slipping from the bed and standing four feet away from her, looking exhausted. "The Smiths have got it right."

"They're just words, Lorcan."

"No, they're not. They're emotions, feelings. They're real."

She stared at him in silence for a moment. "Fine. Then they're borrowed emotions. They might be real, but they're not yours."

He shook his head. "Merlin, what the fuck do you want? Do you want to sit down and have a talk about _feelings_? Is that what you want?"

"Yes, okay? Yes. Let's sit down and talk about feelings. Or we can stand here and continue shouting at each other; whichever. But can we please just say things, can we please just stop fucking quoting?"

"You won't like what I have to say," Lorcan told her, and she shrugged.

"At least you'll be saying something."

"Fine." They were still standing in the middle of the Gryffindor seventh year boys' dormitory, and Lucy had her hand fisted in the material of her sweatshirt, where it hung loose around her hips. Lorcan leaned against his bedpost and crossed his arms. They were standing and shouting, but no one would come in on them—they were alone, for now.

Lucy waited. She had confessed; it was his turn.

He finally said, "I am so fucking pissed at you." He looked it—his lips thin and his arms tight. "And I don't understand. Because you come here and you tell me that you kissed some other bloke and I do not understand why you did it and I also have no idea why you've told me or what you want to happen now." He inhaled, exhaled, inhaled. "Do you want to break up?"

"Please, no." Lucy barely kept her tone from begging.

"Then what the fuck do you want, Lucy?" He leaned away from the post for a moment, toward her, and she could see that he wasn't just pissed: he was hurt and he was jealous and he was lonely and she just felt horribly, horribly guilty. "See, because ever since we started doing...whatever...I haven't even—well, no, that's a lie. I've looked at other girls. But every time I've looked, every time I've thought, 'Oh, her lips look soft' or 'She looks fit,' I always think, 'But Lucy's lips are softer,' 'But Lucy's sexier.' I've never ever _wanted_ to touch anyone else. Every time I've noticed any other girl, I always think that I'd rather you. I'd always rather have you. So you wanted someone else? So you had some other bloke, over there in the States?" He shook his head, leaned it back against the post so his neck stretched pale from his jumper. "How the fuck do you expect me to react?"

Lucy's hands had started shaking somewhere in the middle of all that, and she tucked them into her pockets so he wouldn't notice. But he already knew she was weak. "I expected you to get angry. I just don't want us to end, Lor. And it wasn't about wanting him—I didn't want him."

"Well, what, then? Explain it to me." Even though the words sounded conciliatory, Lorcan's expression, his tone of voice, told her that he was not ready to forgive her. Not at all. Not that she'd expect him to be.

"I...It's only been you, Lorcan. You can't know what that's like. _Only_. Not always; I haven't loved you since I was little. Just these past seven months, just this year, it's been you. I've had you. But I've never had anything with anyone else. And I got jealous, and Seth was there, and I was upset and...you don't know..."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"It was stupid." She covered her face with her hands. He couldn't look at her because what she was saying was dumb and hurtful and petty. "But I just kept seeing you with Dom, over and over again, and I know it was a long time ago but Merlin, you _had_ that, you know? You _wanted_ Dom and you wanted Viv and you wanted Celie and you wanted a lot of others. And you got a lot. And so I just kept seeing you with Dom in my head, you and her against the wall, and I tried to remember if you had ever looked at me like that—with so much wanting—and I couldn't remember, and I started imagining you with every other girl I'd ever heard that you'd fucked or snogged or looked at and I was going crazy. I kept thinking about it because I'd had no one else. Because before you I had books and I had a Muggle life and I had music, and that was it. And it hurt a lot that you might have been always comparing me, always thinking that I didn't kiss as well as my cousin, as any other girl, and I wanted more experience and I didn't want you to be my only anymore because it felt pathetic. And so I kissed Seth." She lifted her head and Lorcan was staring at her, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide. "And it was different and I didn't like it and I left and I came home to you, because there was nowhere else I wanted to go."

"But...how did you even know about Dom?"

"No one likes you," Lucy told him. "Molly _hates_ you. And that's funny, because I was the one who fucked this up, not you, not you at all, but Molly gave me her memory of that night, when you were snogging Dom and they all came because I'd gone missing again. And for some stupid, stupid reason, I put it in my dad's Pensieve and I entered it and it was ages ago and so it shouldn't have bothered me but Merlin, it did."

Lorcan punched the wall. Lucy didn't see it coming. One second he was staring at her, the next he was by the wall, his fist pounding a rapid rhythm against the stones. "Fucking fucking fucking Molly."

"Lorcan," Lucy began, but Lorcan kept going. "Lorcan," she said again. She crossed the space between them and gripped onto his forearm, and then he stopped. Not because she was particularly strong, but because he didn't want to pull her against the stones too. "Lorcan," Lucy said. "It was my fault. Molly was just looking out for me. I knew what was in it; I shouldn't have looked."

He turned to face her and she let go of his arm. His eyes focused on hers and they looked at each other for a silent minute. "Lucy," he said. "Luce. Do you think that when I kiss you, when I touch you, when I'm _with _you, do you think that I'm ever thinking of anyone else?"

"How can you not?" Lucy asked. "Merlin, Lorcan, how could you resist comparing me to everyone else? I know I'm not the prettiest or the most experienced or the smartest and honestly, I don't get why you're with me a lot of the time."

"How do you have such a low opinion of yourself?" He shook his head. "There is only one thing I would ever, ever change about you, Lucy Weasley. Just the one. I wish that you could believe in yourself. You have a right to be confident; you have so many _reasons_ to be confident. I have never once compared you to anyone else." He shook his head. "There's just you. You and your smile and your thoughts and your stupidly small hands and your freakishly large feet and..._you, _ our first conversation, there's been no one else."

"Oh." She glanced down at her feet. "Freakishly large feet?"

"Merlin, it's not a bad thing. Come _on_, Luce. I don't get it." He shook his head. "I just...I just...I still don't see how you could kiss him."

She shook her head. "It was horrible and awful and it didn't even last a full three seconds but...I did." Her eyes were bright with tears and maybe there was no way out of it but she didn't want to cry in front of him. "Can you still love me?"

He gripped the back of his neck with one hand and stuck the other in his pocket. "I can't not love you." That didn't really answer her question, though, so she just stared at him. "I can't not love you, but I want time. I need time."

She nodded. This breaking, this shattering of her heart and the sick feeling to her stomach and the twist of fibres, of veins and nerves in her airway, it was all her doing. So she had to take it and she had to let Lorcan take what he needed.

And if all he asked for was time, then she might be lucky.

"Okay." She turned to leave the dormitory, and just before she left she murmured to the space in the corridor before her, "I'm so sorry, Lorcan."

"I know."

xv. if we're apart at the end, I promise I'll miss you  
>(May, 2022)<p>

Lorcan didn't wait very long to go find Molly after Lucy left his room. He went up to the headmaster's office and begged to use his fireplace to Floo, and the headmaster hadn't really had a reason to keep him there; Lorcan was of age and it was technically Easter hols, after all.

He Flooed to Molly's flat, which he only knew about because Lucy had complained about Molly's boyfriend sometime over Christmas, and he landed in his girlfriend(?)'s sister's kitchen feeling a horrible mixture of anger and defeat.

Molly stood by the stove, her hand frozen on the steaming tea kettle, but other than her unnatural stillness she didn't let on that he'd surprised her. "Hello, Scamander."

"Weasley," he snarled, and she nodded to the table.

"You're Lorcan, then. That makes slightly more sense than Lysander showing up in my kitchen. Take a seat?"

"Thanks, but no." She shrugged and poured the hot water over the tea bag in her mug.

"So, I'm assuming this is about Lucy?"

"Actually, it is about you. What right did you have to give her that memory? You could have told her, okay? You could have told her that I was a man-whore and that you hated me and that you didn't think that she should date me. But you had no right to _show_ her."

"Did she break up with you?" Molly looked almost pleased with herself, and Lorcan was suddenly very grateful that he'd left his wand on his bed. Otherwise, he might have murdered the bitch.

"No," he snapped. "But she did cheat on me."

Molly blinked. "Lucy doesn't cheat," she said.

"There's where you're wrong. Because by giving her that memory, you made Lucy feel like shit. You didn't make her mad at me, which is what I know you wanted; you made her disgusted with herself. You really fucked up, Weasley."

"But...Merlin, Lorcan, don't you see that you're wrong for her?"

He shook his head. "You can't judge me. You don't even know me. I might not be perfect for her, but I love her, and that had been enough. Before you got involved."

"What do you want me to say, that I'm sorry? I'm not. You'd have hurt her eventually, I'm just speeding up the inevitable."

"But you hurt her to do it. I thought you did this because you cared about her; I thought you all suffocate her because you love her. Fuck, you're just a bunch of selfish arseholes, aren't you?"

He didn't wait for her to respond. He stepped back through the fire to Hogwarts, and he brushed past the headmaster with a muttered, "Thank you," and he returned to his dormitory and stuffed his head under his pillow and tried to sleep away all his fucking feelings.

He avoided the library and the Great Hall, and he went an entire week without seeing Lucy. Once classes began again, he was supposed to focus on NEWTs, and he was almost able to forget about the way she'd looked when she'd crashed into his bedroom and told him everything. But sometimes he'd catch sight of her in the halls, of her blonde head ducked as she turned a corner or of her walking quickly away from James, and he'd feel all that sadness and all that longing and all that anger again.

Lorcan was not the angsty type; he tended to get over girls as quickly as he got under them. But he'd never loved before Lucy and he couldn't argue himself out of loving her—he'd tried everything, from imagining her kissing that Muggle bloke to thinking about her feet and the way she always disappeared. But everyone made mistakes and her feet were endearing and she'd disappeared _with_ him, hadn't she?

He took the time she'd given him and he argued with himself, and then he decided that none of it was doing him much good, so he went looking for her.

She wasn't in the library and she wasn't at Hogsmeade and she wasn't in the empty classroom in the dungeons. He was passing back up through the dungeons when he saw Lily hurrying along the corridor ahead of him. "Hey, Potter!"

She whirled. "Scamander," she said slowly. "What d'you need?"

"Your cousin."

She rolled her eyes. "I'm guessing you mean Lucy, but I do have quite a few cousins."

"Yeah, Luce. Do you know where she is?"

"I was actually just looking for her. James hasn't seen her in a couple of days, which isn't unusual because she is avoiding him after the whole catastrophe with you—I'm sorry, by the way, I always liked you—and Hugo told me she hasn't been in Ravenclaw in at least two nights. I was hoping you two had gotten back together, but I guess not."

"Fuck." Lorcan began walking up the stairs beside Lily. "Wait, do you have your broomstick?"

"I don't know. I keep it in the shed. You don't think she might have taken it, do you?"

"If she did, I know where she is."

"Come on, then." Lily started running toward the front doors, and Lorcan caught up to her and passed her. They reached the broom shed to find that Lily's was not where she had left it.

"Good," Lorcan said. He grabbed his broom from its rack and headed outside. "I'll go get her. Tell the others to stand down."

"When you come back, will you be with her again?"

"That's the plan, Potter."

"Good luck, then." Lily waved him off.

He flew east, and he flew into the rain. Water blew cold against his face and leaked through his lips, but he didn't stop, didn't try to change course. He could have told her he'd forgiven her any day in the last two weeks, and he'd had to wait until the most fucking inconvenient time, ever. But as long as he found her, it didn't matter.

The rain was falling softly on the rocks when he landed by the ocean, and at first he didn't see her. And then he passed the largest boulder on the shore, and there she was, her hair plastered to her head and her chin resting on her knees. She must have seen him come down from the sky, but she was still staring out at the water.

"You scared me," he said when he sat on the slippery wet rocks beside her.

"Sorry," she said. "I wanted some time alone, and this seemed like a good place. There's an inn over there," she nodded her head back at the village, "and you know, they don't even ask for identification. They just want money."

"And you had money?"

She shrugged. "I know some people."

He chose to ignore that and asked, "How's it been, being alone?"

"Not as peaceful as I thought it would be. Turns out I miss you, Lorcan."

"Yeah. I've missed you, too."

"How'd your time treat you?"

"I thought it would help me sort everything out. It didn't really." He moved closer to her and wrapped an arm around her. "I just know that I love you madly."

He was quoting again, but she didn't mind. "I love you, too."

"So, no more Muggle blokes for you, and no more rehashing my past. Sound fair?"

"Perfectly."

They were silent together for a while, as the rain soaked them and the waves brushed closer.

"I've got a question," Lorcan said.

"Shoot."

"Why don't we do it in the road?"

Lucy laughed. "How long have you been waiting to ask me that?"

"Since Lily gave me The Beatles. But seriously, though, why don't we?"

"We might be hit by an automobile, or we might be seen."

"Those are your only reasons?"

"Also, it sounds horribly uncomfortable."

"Fine." He looked at the water again. "Do you have another night at the inn?"

She nodded against his shoulder.

"Want to go there?"

"Let's stay out here a little longer. I'll miss the water when we go back to Hogwarts."

He kissed her. "We have forever to find new places," he reminded her.

"Nowhere as lovely as this." And she smiled at him and then pressed her lips to his ear, "I could see doing it on the beach."

He laughed and pressed her back onto the stones, and it was uncomfortable but it was right and the rain sent rivers across their skin, mingling as they pressed close, and freezing, burning, flying, as they burst the space between them.

**A/N:** I hope you all liked that. I appreciate reviews!  
>Also, Ela, I'm sorry there was not more sex. I hope you liked it anyway.<p> 


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